Time and New Product Development

Abstract

In the last chapter we covered the business processes of manufacturing and of the supply chain which encompass the processes of many companies. Within any company there are many other business processes to which exactly the same principles apply. A commercial business process like finance or purchasing may involve the processing of pieces of paper rather than steel. The only differences are in scale — in-trays replace warehouses, briefcases replace trucks. One of the most important business processes is that of designing and developing new products, which for the purposes of this book we will call the ‘new product process’, although it is commonly known by other names such as design or product development. The Time Compression of this process provides the focus for this chapter.