Making Improvements to Product Development within an SME

This paper shares the experiences of a UK based manufacturing small to medium sized enterprise (SME), embedding improvements to a process for new and existing product development (PD). Examples of the improvements include the deployment of advanced tools for capturing the voice of the customer (VOC), creative problem solving and computational design analysis and optimisation.
PD projects and efforts to embed the improvements, within the company, are used as case studies to give examples of the challenges faced, the implications and the corrective action that was taken.
Factors that resulted in waste during development projects usually came from the desire to shortcut the formalised process. Despite the intention of reducing the time spent in development, in the examples given, these actions can result in excess cost and time and in some instances customer dissatisfaction.
SME’s have unique challenges in implementing a product development process due to the closeness of senior management to concept generation and prototype production, solutions are suggested.