Food Product Development - Chapter 1 - Key requirements for successful product development

The product development programme has to bring the strategy into a new product plan for the next few years. It is the directional and the controlling document for the product development projects (Lord, 1999). From the product development strategy, it can develop a rolling programme, which will be quite specific for timing and results for the next two years, but will be more general for future years. The projects have to be integrated in this programme so that the resources, particularly people and equipment, are being used efficiently.

In recent years, there has been more emphasis on the integration of projects as this is where efficiency and improved quality of product development can be achieved. There are problems with the more innovative projects because it is not known how long it will take to create the new knowledge and bring it into the product design and the product commercialisation. But certainly for the incremental changes, this integration of projects can be achieved successfully.

The integration plan needs to take consideration of time, resources and knowledge. In developing the product development programme, it is important to recognise what knowledge is required at the different stages of the project and where this knowledge can be obtained or how it can be created. A great deal of product development knowledge is tacit knowledge in the individual heads and in interactive tacit knowledge in the company. This is a very important consideration in planning the product development programme, especially in large companies. An outsider may be asked to come in because a team is lacking knowledge; the outsider immediately asks why they are not consulting someone in the company who is an expert in this area. In building the programme, there has to be consideration of personnel and in particular their knowledge and skills. How knowledgeable are they in the multidisciplinary skills needed in product develop- ment?

Seldom if ever, when interviewing people for product development do the company personnel ask how creative they are. They look at their academic record and their experience, but do not ask for proof of their creativity. In other industries, product designers customarily carry their portfolio of new products to interviews to show how creative they are; perhaps food product designers should be asked to do the same.

So the product development programme defines the projects, their integration, their timing, the resources they can use, the people involved in the project.

Two other important parts to be included are firstly how decisions are to be made by top management at critical points in the project and how the costs are to be controlled.

Critical points are always the points between the main stages of the PD Process. But in large projects there may be intervening critical points. For example a critical point is at the end of product development and process design. Because of the expense of scale-up, there may also be a critical point after the laboratory or small-scale trials to find the optimum product and process. At each critical point, decisions have to be made by senior management on whether the project is to continue as planned, slowed down or dropped. The outcomes of the previous development must provide the information for the managers to make these decisions.

For example, at the end of the product concept development, the outcomes include product design specifications, some product mock-ups and a product report. The product report includes the technical feasibility, marketing suitability, consumer acceptance, future predicted project costs, prediction of sales revenue and profits, risks, probability of product success and probability of project success. The details of the product report vary with the company and the project. For the incremental change, management may want only to have the product design specifications, consumer acceptance, product costs, predicted price. It is very important that what is needed as outcomes at the critical points are clearly identified in the product development programme and agreed by the top management who are to make the decisions.

It is necessary to define any constraints on the project, from either company or environmental needs, particularly societal and political constraints. The company or the society may restrict the raw materials used, the political regulations may define some of the properties of the products or the processing method. There may also be cost constraints caused by the price range in the market, and the company's pricing structure. Constraints need to be identified as they outline the ball-park for the product, and the product development.

Finally the product development programme needs to define the measures of success for the individual projects and the programme. The standards for the final evaluation of the success of the products in the market also need to be set, so that the sales revenue, profits and time for sales to grow are all set long before the product is launched. The standard for the project organisation also needs to be set - what is the range of timing, what is the quality of the work expected in the project, what multifunctional integration is expected, what cost over-run can be tolerated?

As described here, developing the product development programme is a complex and difficult task. What has been said is more directly appropriate to large enterprises with multiple projects and large resources, but the principles are just the same, and just as significant, in much smaller companies. The same considerations apply. It is important to cover them comprehensively and carefully so that the possible failures and problems are identified before the major effort and money is spent, rather than in the middle of projects where cost can grow astronomically.