Business Process Improvement

In today's manufacturing environment, the successful launch of a new product is imperative to maintain competitive advantage, growth and relevance in the market. As a product progresses through the New Product Development (NPD) process, some changes are made to the original product designs and specifications. Even though these engineering changes (ECs) affect an NPD process,there is still a limitation on the amount of academic research published on the topic, especially in comparison with those of NPD. It is therefore imperative for any organization to develop formal and appropriate procedures to guide its product development process so that products are successfully launched with minimal cost and development time. This book therefore, provides recommendations based on result of a case study on how the NPD process in an FMCG can be improved,engineering changes that occur during the NPD process managed and also measurement of the process performance. It provides a practical basis on which manufacturing firms can execute their NPD processes to achieve overall effectiveness. This can be generalized across a large number of manufacturing contexts due to the broad nature of the sample.