Improving on time-to-market
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2003 7:00:00 AM
Time-to-market (T2M) is a metric that ties right back to strategic marketplace advantage. Fundamentally, it's the amount of time that passes from the moment something becomes a formal project to the time it reaches volume availability.
"The cool thing about the measure of time is that improving it will usually improve a whole number of things associated with not wasting time, such as customer satisfaction," says Mark Deck, a lead director of the product development practice at management consulting firm PRTM.
Time is money in many ways, says Deck, who points out that if T2M is cut, a company can enjoy higher margins for a longer period. "If you miss the market window in some markets, you can miss as much as 30 percent of the revenue opportunity," Deck says.
While collaborative product development software can speed T2M, Deck contends that improving the metric typically boils down to solid project management practices. It also helps to have "top-down" planning guidelines where over time, the organization knows how much time it takes to complete an average project, knows the steps and standards involved, and enforces them. This avoids bottom-up infinite scheduling," he says, adding that projections from the back end usually are much longer than they need to be.
Planning and project management should be enforced at three levels to improve T2M, says Deck. First is the overall individual project. Second, manage by phases—such as concept, design, development, test, or launch—using time as an ongoing progress measure for each. Finally, there is a need to aggregate and manage all projects as an overall program.
