Reliable, Faster New Product Development

New Case Study Reveals How a Danish Client Is Reducing Getting to Market 30-40% Faster

“Speed to Market” and “Timely Launch” to ensure customer satisfaction and maximum return on investment are everyone’s top expectations of new product development.  However, both large and small companies often struggle with that resulting in dissatisfied customer base, lost opportunities, and significant waste of resources.

The first challenge when addressing these issues is revealing and understanding everything that’s currently being done to bring a new product to market.  The process always crosses departmental boundaries and evolves in isolation over time, which tends to make it highly convoluted. Until everything is mapped out in detail, no one has any idea of all the steps that are required—or that have been added at some point but no one remembers why—and how tortuous the process has become.

Headquartered in Denmark, LINAK is a leading global manufacturer of electric linear actuators; and has grown dramatically over recent decades.  As the company grew, as often happens, their new product development process had become slower, and less reliable. The LINAK management team set a strategic goal of being both fast and innovative in the markets where they compete and contracted TBM to support the improvement initiative.  Specifically, they wanted to reduce their average new product lead times by 30 to 40 percent, and always hit their launch deadlines.

Following an initial assessment of past projects, as we detail in our newest case study about new product development, mapping out the new product development process was the activity that we did when we started working with LINAK.  The mapping exercise, from the initial idea through product launch and beyond, was intense. Like all kaizen events, one of the core achievements was working through all of the details and conflicts, making collaborative decisions, and accomplishing in a week what would have taken months if they had tried to do it in sporadic hour-long meetings.

Key to the success of that kaizen event—and subsequent events that have further refined and piloted LINAK’s new product development process—has been top management’s understanding, active nurturing of the process, and clear communication that this isn’t just a product development or engineering project. It’s a company-wide effort of equal priority to other corporate goals.

Such management commitment is necessary to achieve customer delight and successful growth by both increasing the speed of development and delivering new products on time, at the right quality and cost.