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5 Compelling Reasons Why You Need NPD Software

January 31, 2024

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Organizations focused on new product development must speed up innovation and fend off disruption – if they are serious about survival and growth.  In this regard, companies are mostly focusing on the people-driven innovation and are not paying the required attention to the ‘enabler’ of new product development process, i.e., NPD Software or New Product Development Software.  It is still unfortunate that many leaders don’t yet realize that delivering new product development projects is one thing – and delivering them better than the competition is a different ball game!

Stages of New Product Development

Let us try to dissect the top five compelling reasons for investing in NPD Software.

1. DIGITIZED NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Organizations that create new products thrive on idea generation.  However, in most cases, the new product development process of idea generation is ad hoc and inconsistent.  Reliance on spreadsheets, documents, and emails is the norm.  It is not hard to analyse why most companies struggle to pursue great ideas swiftly – leading to missed business opportunities and organizational survival.

For today’s business leaders and product managers, time is the biggest constraint, and they need to extract maximum value from every minute.  In this background, NPD Software becomes the foundation step towards digital transformation – with capabilities to digitize every aspect of the NPD process, templates, checklists, workflows, decision-points, escalations, alerts, notifications, and others.  Without a digitized approach, leaders lose the overall momentum needed to drive the business to faster product launches and higher levels of growth and profitability.

New Product Development Software such as TouchBase NPD offer a high degree of digitalization of the NPD process – that too specific to your industry and products.

2. STREAMLINED DIGITIZED IDEA GENERATION & EVALUATION

In a hyper-competitive world, teams must generate ideas swiftly accompanied by a smooth and streamlined NPD process for idea consolidation and review.  Leaders must be empowered with new ideas along with necessary details that aid meticulous evaluation.  The reality is quite the opposite – NPD teams continue to struggle with ad hoc idea generation leading to missed business opportunities. 

Leading New Product Development Software such as TouchBase NPD streamlines the process of new idea generation and evaluation specific to the needs of your industry and products.

3. METICULOUS NPD BUSINESS CASE CREATION

Every NPD Idea has varying levels of probability of success and failure.  Even when ideas are generated, it may not be feasible for the company to pursue all of them due to financial and resource constraints.  In most cases, new ideas are not backed by thorough and meticulous business cases.  Without rigorous business idea evaluation, organizations run the risk of pursuing weak ideas.  As a result of ad hoc idea generation and weak business case creation, it becomes obvious that the investment decisions may lack conviction.  Instances of organizations burning millions of dollars are very common. 

The investments in NPD projects must be carefully chosen for effective management of financial investments.  Depending on the nature of the idea, detailed business cases must accompany new ideas.  The business case must capture technical aspects of the product, financial justification, benchmarking parameters, regulatory factors, etc.  Further, these business cases must be uniquely designed to the diversity of new ideas. 

Investing in a New Product Development Software such as TouchBase NPD supports immaculate, templatized, and context-specific business case creation.

4. PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PLANNING, EXECUTION, AND LAUNCH

Approved ideas are just the beginning.  The proof of the pudding is in their planning, execution, and launch!  NPD project planning can be very complex with numerous dimensions including scope definition, specifications planning, resources estimation, cost estimation & budgeting, procurement planning, quality planning, risk identification & response planning, and documentation.  Organizations struggle to plan and flawlessly execute NPD projects.  Most projects are managed on spreadsheets, documents, emails, etc.  These lead to data integrity issues, avoidable team conflicts, and lower efficiency and productivity.  The result – delayed product launch and lost revenues.  Collaboration is a key driver of NPD projects, be it cross-functional teams, customers, vendors, or government agencies. 

TouchBase NPD Software enables comprehensive project planning as well as tracking of – scope including EDM (BOM/BOQ), Work Breakdown Structure, schedule creation, critical path analysis, budgets, risk identification & assessment, and documentation – all configured to your organizational needs.

5. SOCIAL, MOBILE, AND ANALYTICS

Business and product managers need insights for swift decision-making.  Knowing what ‘has already happened’ is not as important as knowing ‘what would happen.’  The role of analytics-driven dashboards, alerts, and notifications does not need any over-emphasis.  Further, today’s leaders need insights ‘on the go’, for which solutions need to be ‘Mobile’ with capabilities to collaborate virtually anywhere in this globe.

A New Product Development Software offers strong capabilities of analytics, mobile access, and social platform for virtual collaboration.

BUSINESS IMPACT WHERE IT MATTERS!

To summarize, a top-class New Product Development Software delivers holistic business impact by –

  1. Digitizing the complete NPD cycle.
  2. Seamlessly capturing new ideas to maximize business opportunities
  3. Supporting data-driven ‘go-kill’ new idea decisions.
  4. Offering greater revenue forecast visibility.
  5. Enabling optimized resource utilization.
  6. Facilitating flawless planning and execution of NPD projects.
  7. Driving real-time internal & external stakeholder collaboration.
  8. Delivering single version of NPD truth.
  9. Fostering new product launches at warp speed to maximize business value.

TouchBase NPD Software is created with the strategic design principles of high configurability and holistic solution and is backed by capabilities to suit the requirements of modern-day professionals across diverse industries.

Srikanth PV

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Srikanth PV comes with two decades of global corporate and consulting background across industries with diverse roles including Strategy, Leadership, and Management. Currently, Srikanth is Head, PPM Content Management at Kytes focused on content management strategy aimed to empower customers create and enhance value through its flagship digital solution - Kytes PSA. Srikanth is also a former member of the Board of Directors of PMI Bangalore Chapter.

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