New Product Development - NPD Solutions

Top innovators create 10 times the return on investment, three times the rate of successful product launches and three and a half times the number of products launched on time than the innovation laggards in their industry. The primary driver of this massive performance gap is the quality of top innovators innovation management processes.

IFT’s Stage-Gate® Ready certified, end-to-end NPD solution automates your management processes to drive innovation performance. Helping you to retain or achieve your position as a top innovator. Our solution combines best-practices with best software capabilities to quickly make your innovation improvement initiative a reality:

Best Software: Powered by Planisware, our Stage-Gate® Ready certified software delivers comprehensive and easy-to- use capabilities all in a single, fully integrated web-based application and database, with no need for other add-on third party or open source software to complete the solution.

Best Practices: Our solution incorporates best practices from Stage-Gate, Project Management Institute (PMBOK), Six Sigma, Agile project management and the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA).

IFT's NPD Solution

Powered by Planisware™, IFT's solution for NPD consists of the following process areas, which can be deployed individually, and incrementally, to expand your process capabilities over time as and when your organization is ready. Each process area is highly configurable, enabling you to mold the solution to fit your specific business needs, rather than trying to force fit your organization into a straight-jacket process model:

Strategic Planning and Roadmapping.
Follow PDMA guidelines and Nu Angle best practices to define and communicate your innovation strategy. Define market, competitive and core competency objectives and milestones on a timeline. Define your product and technology roadmaps and dependencies and link these to strategic objectives. Identify portfolio management criteria and strategic funding buckets to achieve your strategic goals.

Portfolio Management.
Follow experts Cooper and Edget's best-practices for step-by-step portfolio management techniques for optimal investment in NPD projects.

Resource Capacity Planning.
Model the planned and actual supply of generic resources from business units and the demand for those generic resources by projects, in order to constrain portfolio selection and maximize the utilization of your NPD resources.

Budgeting, Forecasting and Tracking.
Plan, budget, forecast and track financial costs (capital and expense), revenues and profitability in multiple currencies for each business unit, strategic bucket and project.

Stage-Gate® Governance.
Follow Stage-Gate Inc’s best practices for Stage-Gate management to bring products successfully to market.

Project Management and Collaboration.
Plan, execute, track and control your project plan following best-practice Project Management Institute (PMI) guidelines, and enhance project team collaboration to reduce time-to-market and launch date slippages.

Resource Management and Time tracking.
Manage the assignment of named resources to projects in order to make sure projects are properly staffed for success, and to optimize the utilization of your resources.

Idea Management.
IFT’s NPD solution includes an integrated Idea Management module to issue ideation challenges, capture and develop ideas, search the idea bank, and evaluate ideas to select those to be proposed as development projects.

Reporting and Analytics.
Generate graphical dashboards and reports on any information stored in the system, to monitor performance and support data-based decision making.

Data sharing with other systems.
Share data with transactional business applications, to ensure data accuracy and provide users with a comprehensive view of product development information. Share data with MS Word, MS Excel and MS Project for ad-hoc reporting and analysis.

What we replace

Our all-in-one NPD solution replaces stand-alone, dispersed and loosely integrated systems such as:

Desktop productivity tools like spreadsheets, Microsoft Project or PowerPoint that lead to disconnected and inconsistent product information. Home grown New Product Development systems based on work-flows and document collaboration places like Microsoft Sharepoint or Lotus Notes. Traditional project management tools that manage only project and resource-related information without linking them to product portfolio information. Niche NPD software packages which automate only parts of the NPD process (idea management, portfolio, stage-gate etc.) or rely on third party software to provide a broader solution

What we complement

ERP and financial systems such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft JD Edwards, etc. PLM systems such as IBM PLM , Dassault Systems ENOVIA , SAP, Oracle Agile, Siemens PLM, etc. Business Intelligence tools such as Oracle Hyperion, IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, etc. Enterprise Document Management Tools such as EMC Documentum, etc.

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