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In commerce, time to market (TTM) is the length of time it takes from a product being conceived until its being available for sale. The reason that time to market is so important is since being late erodes the addressable market into which producers have to sell their product. [1] A common assumption is that TTM matters most for first-of-a-kind products, but actually a late product launch in any industry can negatively impact revenues—from reducing the window of opportunity to generate revenues to causing the product to become obsolete faster. [2]
There are no standards for measuring TTM, and measured values can vary greatly. First, there is great variation in how different organizations define the start of the period.
For example, in the automotive industry the development period starts when the product concept is approved. [3] Other organizations realize that little will happen until the project is staffed, which can take a long time after approval if developers are tied up on existing projects. Therefore, they consider the start point when the project is fully staffed. The initial part of a project—before approval has been given or full staffing is allocated—has been called the fuzzy front end, and this stage can consume a great deal of time. Even though the fuzzy front end is difficult to measure, it must be included in TTM measurements for effective TTM management.
Next, definitions of the end of the TTM period vary. Those who look at product development as engineering say the project is finished when engineering department transfers it to manufacturing. Others define the conclusion as when they ship the first copy of the new product or when a customer buys it. High-volume industries will often define the end point in terms of reaching a certain production volume, such as a million units per month.[ citation needed ]
Finally, TTM measurements vary greatly depending on complexity –- complexity of the product itself, the technologies it incorporates, its manufacturing processes, or the organizational complexity of the project (for example, outsourced components). New-to-the-world products are much slower than derivatives of existing products. Some companies have been successful in putting their products into categories of newness, but establishing levels of complexity remains elusive.
Although TTM can vary widely, all that matters is an organization's TTM capability relative to its direct competitors. Organizations in other industries may be much faster, but do not pose a competitive threat, although one may be able to learn from them and adapt their techniques.
A tacit assumption of many is that TTM and product quality are opposing attributes of a development process. TTM may be improved (shortened) by skipping steps of the development process, thus compromising product quality. [4] For those who use highly structured development processes such as Phase–gate model or Six Sigma, product development is often viewed as a clearly defined sequence of steps to be followed. Skipping a step—due to perceived time pressure, for example—may not only undercut quality but can ultimately lengthen TTM if the organization must complete or repeat the step later.
Other organizations operate more aggressively, recognizing that not all steps need to be completed for every project. Furthermore, they actively apply tools and techniques that will shorten or overlap steps, cut decision-making time, and automate activities. Many such tools and techniques are available (see References below).
Organizations pursue TTM improvement for a variety of reasons. Some variations of TTM are
These types of TTM illustrate that an organization's TTM goals should be aligned with its business strategy rather than pursuing speed blindly.
The first recorded conference on Time-to-Market was organized by Bart Hall of AiC and held on 25 and 26 October 1995 at the St James Hotel in London. It was chaired by Mike Woodman, then of Logica and now of Coplexia Consulting, and Allen Porter of AIIT.
Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. The primary constraints are scope, time, and budget. The secondary challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and apply them to meet pre-defined objectives.
An application-specific integrated circuit is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec. Application-specific standard product chips are intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 series or the 4000 series. ASIC chips are typically fabricated using metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technology, as MOS integrated circuit chips.
The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom "a chain is no stronger than its weakest link". That means that organizations and processes are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them, or at least adversely affect the outcome.
In business and engineering, product development or new product development covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market, renewing an existing product and introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design, along with various business considerations. New product development is described broadly as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. The products developed by an organisation provide the means for it to generate income. For many technology-intensive firms their approach is based on exploiting technological innovation in a rapidly changing market.
Six Sigma (6σ) is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by American engineer Bill Smith while working at Motorola in 1986.
Marketing management is the organizational discipline which focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.
In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products. PLM integrates people, data, processes, and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprises.
Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a collection of best-practices for the development of new products and processes. It is sometimes deployed as an engineering design process or business process management method. DFSS originated at General Electric to build on the success they had with traditional Six Sigma; but instead of process improvement, DFSS was made to target new product development. It is used in many industries, like finance, marketing, basic engineering, process industries, waste management, and electronics. It is based on the use of statistical tools like linear regression and enables empirical research similar to that performed in other fields, such as social science. While the tools and order used in Six Sigma require a process to be in place and functioning, DFSS has the objective of determining the needs of customers and the business, and driving those needs into the product solution so created. It is used for product or process design in contrast with process improvement. Measurement is the most important part of most Six Sigma or DFSS tools, but whereas in Six Sigma measurements are made from an existing process, DFSS focuses on gaining a deep insight into customer needs and using these to inform every design decision and trade-off.
Concurrent engineering (CE) or concurrent design and manufacturing is a work methodology emphasizing the parallelization of tasks, which is sometimes called simultaneous engineering or integrated product development (IPD) using an integrated product team approach. It refers to an approach used in product development in which functions of design engineering, manufacturing engineering, and other functions are integrated to reduce the time required to bring a new product to market.
Operations management is concerned with designing and controlling the production of goods or services, ensuring that businesses are efficient in using resources to meet customer requirements.
Integrated circuit design, or IC design, is a sub-field of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits, or ICs. ICs consist of miniaturized electronic components built into an electrical network on a monolithic semiconductor substrate by photolithography.
Empathic design is a user-centered design approach that pays attention to the user's feelings toward a product. The empathic design process is sometimes mistakenly referred to as empathetic design.
A lean laboratory is one which is focused on processes, procedures, and infrastructure that deliver results in the most efficient way in terms of cost, speed, or both. Lean laboratory is a management and organization process derived from the concept of lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System (TPS). The goal of a lean laboratory is to reduce resource usage and costs while improving productivity, staff morale, and laboratory-driven outcomes.
A glossary of terms relating to project management and consulting.
Innovation management is a combination of the management of innovation processes, and change management. It refers to product, business process, marketing and organizational innovation. Innovation management is the subject of ISO 56000 series standards being developed by ISO TC 279.
Lean IT is the extension of lean manufacturing and lean services principles to the development and management of information technology (IT) products and services. Its central concern, applied in the context of IT, is the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service.
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.
The service blueprint is a technique originally used for service design, but has also found applications in diagnosing problems with operational efficiency. The technique was first described by G. Lynn Shostack, a bank executive, in the Harvard Business Review in 1984. The service blueprint is an applied process chart which shows the service delivery process from the customer's perspective. The service blueprint has become one of the most widely used tools to manage service operations, service design and service.
SPADE is a software development productivity and quality tool used to create professional software in a short time and with little effort. As seen in the diagram SPADE automates many manual activities of the Software development process. It therefore takes less time and effort to perform the full software development cycle.