Globalization isn’t just a trend anymore, it’s a necessity. If you plan to be a big player, you need to go global. For companies who are doing business globally, product development management is a vital part of their business. The global supply chain can impact your product’s success in a major way, which is why it’s so important to make sure all aspects of your product development are being managed as efficiently as possible.
When your firm is doing business globally, you may have part of your supply chain in one country, and a different part in another country. Project management for global product development can help you manage this, as well as provide better engineering efficiency, access to international expertise, more flexible resource allocation, and products that are designed for the global marketplace.
There are three things most companies don’t realize about global manufacturing. Global manufacturing:
- Allows products to compete on a global scale,
- Uses more sophisticated supply chains, and
- Requires a greater supply of goods.
Global product development brings with it a number of challenges, including managing a geographically diverse product development team and coordinating sourcing of materials from low, medium, and high cost areas. Product development management can help mitigate the challenges of global product development in the following ways.
Maintaining Product Development as a Priority
A product development manager and their team must be committed to the success of the product development strategy. The best ways to do this are to assemble an ideal product development team dedicated to global product management or to outsource your product development management to a firm that specializes in this service. Global centers will need to be set up to facilitate the distribution of work and determine what tools, resources, training, and processes need to be in place.
Compartmentalizing Processes and Parts
When managing product development for a global business, it’s important to separate processes for global distribution. You’ll need to determine which processes will be handled by which team and in which country. Similarly, you’ll need to determine which locations are the best for manufacturing component parts in such a way that their separate development as well as their integration into the complete product is optimized.
Making Detailed Project Plans
Part of the product development management process is to determine what decisions will be made at what stage of the process. This becomes even more important when your business is global. It’s no longer just a matter of who’s doing what when, but you also have to decide who at which location is making the decisions. It’s important to coordinate decisions across the entire product development team at all locations of your operation.
At Pivot International, we provide product development and project management services to help global businesses with their product development so they can focus on the rest of their business. We coordinate everything from conceptualization all the way to product manufacturing and distribution. Our project managers are world class and have experience launching a diverse portfolio of award-winning products. To learn more about how we can help you with your global product development, contact us today.
