Drive Awareness and Action to Optimize Your Product Launch Process
This is article is part of a series of monthly articles produced by Harbour Results for PMA’s MetalForming Business Edge e-newsletter. Click here to view the full collection of articles.
All too often manufacturing is broken down into two categories – winning the work and doing the work, creating a “business development vs. production” dichotomy that can eat away at efficiency and customer satisfaction. The reality is product launch is one of the most important parts of your business and we have found it is not a priority for many companies and is only addressed when there is an issue – this is a missed opportunity for most.
Successful product launch is critical to initial and ongoing customer satisfaction, which is the foundation for a long-term relationship. Meeting initial expectations of time, quality and costs help create a trusted partnership across your customer – procurement, engineering and quality – resulting in satisfaction.
Have you reviewed your product launch process recently? Have you used recent lessons learned to improve your launch process? Are all your customers satisfied? If you answered “no” to any of these questions keep reading.
Customer satisfaction is dependent on meeting expectations. It is important to understand what each customer expects (because it will likely be different) and establish if those expectations are achievable before you start. However, the job does not stop there, you must manage the customer throughout the entire product launch process and communication is the key.
APQP checklists often fail to define the appropriate communication required both internally and externally to keep all parties informed and aligned. Communication milestones need to be established and both parties must confirm that the message is understood, the impact on the project is clear and the next steps are assigned. For example, general project timelines don’t always reflect potential delays when specific steps are missed. More specifically they do not clearly communicate the impact if the customer doesn’t meet their required dates to provide files, necessary responses, and approval requirements. When not communicated, their failure puts additional pressure to “recover” the lost time on you. The goal is to not have any surprises and ensure the customer understands all aspects of the product launch, everyone’s role, and what is needed to achieve the deadline.
Another important aspect of product launch is vendor selection and management. You must select a vendor that can deliver to your customer expectations AND benefit your internal team. Price should not drive the decision. Leaders need to determine the best fit based on the required deliverables, ensure alignment in culture and approach to work and emphasize communication. You can’t fix what you don’t know.
A successful product launch plan isn’t an omnipresent checklist that covers every detail of the launch process. The process starts with establishing the end goal based on expectations you created in collaboration with your customer and works backward identifying the deliverables needed to achieve that goal. Additionally, it is important to realize that the launch processes has both external and internal customers and that the internal customer – production – expectations for delivery are just as important as the external customer.
Once deliverables have been identified then determine what role should be responsible. Then build the defined deliverables into a workflow. A common approach is a gate structure where specific actions must be completed before transitioning to the next key step in the launch process. We strongly recommend limiting the gates to critical events and that they run through the entire launch process – tool design approval, tool delivery and sample preparation, sample activity and pre-production trials, approval submission, approval receipt, initial production run review and lessons learned. To achieve success the internal team must support and agree with the launch process and clearly understand the expectations and the role they play in achieving each gate.
The product launch process you develop cannot identify every possible obstacle that will be faced during the program launch. Your success depends on how you address those challenges to meet customer expectations. Those with best-in-class launch processes have learned to anticipate the obstacles, excel at creating recovery plans and can quickly pivot.
The final important step in improving your product launch process is what should be the final gate – lessons learned. Once a product is in production teams can be too busy or starting a new project and miss reviewing launch performance or, more likely, they don’t want to re-visit launch failures. If you want to have a top-performing organization, teams need to be honest, critical, and willing to identify failures in the process – identifying what worked and what didn’t. Metrics should initiate the conversations – where did we fail to meet the timing and cost expectations? What did we do that worked well? Look at every aspect of the process to evaluate what should remain the same in the future and what needs to change.
We often talk about continuous improvement across your operation and the launch process is no different. Leaders need to challenge and motivate their teams to achieve a best-in-class product launch. It will improve profitability and generate repeat work.