Maximizing Product Development ROI

Web-Enabling Your New Product Development

Web-enabling the product development process promises to provide the next level of productivity improvement in new product development (NPD). To help our clients to realize these benefits, GMT has formed a strategic alliance with Integrated Development Enterprise, Inc., (IDe), the leader in Web-Enabled NPD solutions.

The GMT/IDe alliance combines GMT’s proven strategy and process consulting services with the leading Web-Enabled NPD technology, resulting in an enterprise-wide solution configured to your organization structure and NPD process. With GMT, you benefit from a fact-based strategy driving a cross-functional product development process, customized to your business and widely embraced across the enterprise. With IDe, you maximize these benefits through the use of productivity enhancing, powerful, breakthrough technology.

Many companies have found the most effective way to organize (a matrix of market-focused business units and centralized functions) adds complexity and coordination obstacles to their NPD process. This is further complicated by aggressive product innovation strategies and global sourcing initiatives. IDe’s Web capabilities accelerate the process of collaboration and alignment across all the boundaries created in this type of organization.

IDe Web-based software is ideally suited to this environment. The distributed nature of the Web architecture enables real-time information sharing and widespread collaboration, even among widely dispersed development groups. IDe software also aligns development projects with business strategy. An integrated financial management capability provides consolidated project information, both forecast and actuals, instead of piecemeal functional budgets.

Web-Enable Your New Product Development Process

	Integrate all development information across the enterprise, including project and resource planning, and portfolio management; update this information routinely, on a daily basis.
	Accelerate time to market and pipeline throughput by increasing resource productivity.
	Align new product strategies with the daily activities of engineering and operations.
	Coordinate activities with development partners around the world.
	Make better and quicker tactical decisions using real-time product and resource data.
	Coordinate product launches for maximum market impact.
	Drive revenue growth, profitability, and market share with improved new product success.

Automate and Integrate NPD Management Functions

ID web™, IDe’s core product, integrates portfolio, resource, project, and process management. Additional IDe products integrate idea management along with financial, partner, and report management. Up to now, if a company wanted to use automation to improve product development, it had to implement individual functional solutions to do so. The heavy interdependence of these functions in daily practice makes this approach to “automation” very cumbersome.

While there are many general tools available for project management, few are designed to manage the complexity of product development. Organizations often struggle just to fit NPD project management into their environment, even without addressing the more complex topics of resource, portfolio, and process management.

IDe’s breakthrough software was developed by and for product development professionals to integrate all of NPD’s management functions. These include project planning and management, resources allocation, and the roll-up of real-time project information to inform portfolio decisions, all in the context of a Stage-Gate management—the most common development process used today.

Maximize The Impact Of Your NPD Process

The complexities of product development begin at the single project level. Cross-functional teams manage projects through several stages, each separated by gates where they undergo executive review and may be accelerated, decelerated, deferred, resequenced, or even canceled, depending on project performance, shifting market conditions, and other factors. The complexities accumulate as multiple projects are pursued simultaneously and compete for time, people and funding.

The GMT/IDe partnership energizes this process. Every aspect of the IDe’s software automatically feeds the Stage-Gate methodology. ID web reconciles top-down business strategy with bottom-up project details, allowing effective portfolio management at the strategic level and efficient resource utilization within the ranks. Project status reports, once requiring weeks of preparation, are an automatic byproduct of the system’s use. Across the entire organization, there is far better NPD information flow and decision-making, all with far less effort.

GMT and IDe...Your Partners in Automating NPD

There is no substitute for creative, efficient, and energized product development, but practically any executive, manager, or team member working in product development today acknowledges there is enormous opportunity to improve the process by reducing the low-value efforts it entails.

The GMT/IDe partnership offers unsurpassed expertise to help you use the power of the Web to streamline one of your most strategic activities—the innovation and development of new products.