Lifecycle Integration Of R&D, Quality Manufacturing, And Services

Concurrent product development (CPD) integrates contributions from diverse functions throughout a development lifecycle to provide customers with valued offerings. Almost all human consumption involves combinations of physical objects and intangible entities. Customer offering vary in the extent to which products are blended with services. But the literature on concurrency has focused far more on design for manufacturability (DFM) than design for serviceability (DFS), even though many industrial corporations make far more profit from services than from manufacturing physical products. Although the practices of the composite model of SPOT apply to services as well as goods products, most industries develop each kind of customer offering separately and patch them together, if at all, after the fact.The opportunity costs of failing to concurrently integrate the development and manufacture of quality products and service development are huge. This chapter attempts to help fill a gap in understanding opportunities goods companies have for simultaneously developing customer offerings by integrating services with goods. Many producers of goods have an opportunity to extend the lifecycle of their customer offerings by proactively forging a relatively new kind of business model for integrating pre- and post-sale features of holistic customer offerings. To optimize quality, new service developers (NSDs), as well as manufacturing engineers are simultaneously engaged in decisions at the outset of the lifecycle. R&D functions collaborate with manufacturing and NSDs to codesign holistic new offerings. They consult with marketing and service staff to understand ways of rectifying shortcomings in customer experiences.The challenge of extending the lifecycle of customer offerings to include follow-on services is the imperative of continual defect reduction. A leading indicator of the deployment of CPD best practices is the reduction of late-stage changes to fulfill the in-use requirements of customers. Late-stage changes in-house are exponentially more expensive than earlier ones because of baked-in design options. Customer issues with quality frequently incur even greater costs in lost reputation and sales than in repairs. Defects causing late changes indicate inadequate collaboration among development stakeholders, delaying the completion of the lifecycle.The difficulty of overcoming barriers to concurrency in the co-development of goods and services is illustrated in a case study. R&D and service functions diverged widely in responding to a set of identical questions on product development practices. The gulf in design versus service perspectives sparked concerted initiatives to implement a holistic business model for collaborative development of goods and services. Five other examples are provided of goods companies that have succeeded in integrating services as vital for enhancing the value of their customer offerings.A prerequisite for achieving revenue from post-sale services is the minimization of defects to preclude late-stage changes that disrupt integrated lifecycle flows. An index of improvement in time compression, cost reduction, and quality, as indicated by continual defect reduction is included in a TCQ index. Two groups of SPOT practices measuring lifecycle integration are provided in Appendix Table 17A, so readers may benchmark predictors of the TCQ index and of sales of new products. Another group of 10 practices pertinent to lifecycle integration is provided in Appendix Table 17B, which predicts development cycle time compression, a key indicator of concurrency, as well as overall performance.