New Product Development Strategy for International Joint Venture

An automobile manufacturer engaged Analysis Group to help enhance its product development process in a high-risk and uncertain environment with investment in a new plant, a new country, a new work force, and new supplier channels. We created systems and tools that would highlight new product development problems early. As part of our approach, we formalized a product creation strategy in a contract book to ensure alignment across the functions. We implemented a fully integrated timing management system to allow visibility of progress and delays, and then created a process to fully develop team skills to enhance communication and cross-functional learning. We introduced dashboards to monitor in-process project progress and to highlight issues early. And finally, we established a process of periodic prototyping of the product's design to iteratively test and refine design concepts.