Introduction
In a world marked by ultra-competitiveness, with high speeds in terms of communication, where the times for the development and placing on the market of products and services have become crucial, and where many strategists make this the fundamental competitive advantage, the analysis and implementation of methods aimed at easing these processes is crucial.
Never before like now, time is worth money. The increasingly short life cycles of products and services, forces companies to rapidly develop substitutes. The strategy consists of cannibalizing the products themselves through new designs, in such a way as to always have the competitors behind.
We live in an age marked by the thousandth of a second. In a Formula One race between the first and the other competitors there are thousandths or hundredths of a second, but that means getting on the podium or not. The same happens with the Olympic competitions, you fight to lose hundredths of a second in the races. With more reason in the business world where not a gold medal is at stake but the very survival of the company, of the jobs, and the benefits and profitability of the same, arriving in the shortest possible time is everything.
The time curve - benefits
The relationship between benefits and the amount of time required to put the product or services on the market is represented by a curve with a negative slope, which means that the shorter the time or term to reach the market, the greater the benefits.
While point W represents the position of Competitive Advantage, point Y implies a position of Competitive Disadvantage. The difference between both positions that we will call d (delta) constitutes the Opportunity Cost. Failure to enter the market earlier implies: the loss of customers in the hands of substitute products or services, of competing agents, the loss of interest of potential claimants, the loss of favorable moments and the cost of not being able to use that time and other resources in the development of other products and services.
Reasons that originate this curve
1º) Entering the market in the first place leads to achieving primacy in POSITIONING matters, and therefore it remains with the first place in market share for the product or service in question. This implies that the shorter the time, the greater the benefits resulting from a greater market share.
2º) In today's hyper-competitive markets, with a global offer (the bidders are from anywhere on the planet), with fast possibilities and at almost zero cost of accessing information and knowledge, there are many in the world who have thoughts Parallels of development, delay in reaching the market may mean being left out of it, or placing oneself in a lower position.
3º) Greater speed of putting products or services on the market, or what is the same, less time to put the product on the market, implies the possibility of a greater number of launches per year, this means greater benefits when reaching different types of users or consumers.
4th) Greater number of launches allows a distribution of fixed costs among a greater number of products or services, with the consequent impact on costs, and marginal contributions.
5th) The longer the time, the greater the chances of data leakage, which implies the possibility of parallel developments or strategic advances by competitors.
6th) The shorter the time (term) for development and placing on the market, the greater the possibilities of making the products and services themselves obsolete through new designs and models, avoiding competition from competitors through copies. In this way, it is possible to continuously command the market. An example of this is the Japanese company Sony with its continuous launch of products, a similar example is that of Casio.
7º) As time passes, costs increase, staff are demotivated, pressure increases and there are greater chances of losing staff involved in development.
Ways to decrease or shorten times
Joint design engineering. It implies the participation at the same time of specialists in marketing, production operations, sales, finance and costs, and designers, in such a way that it is possible to avoid wasting time in showing and correcting designs. In addition, working together allows combining ideas that enrich the development of the product or service.
Teamwork. Fundamental in order to increase ideas, advance on safe steps and avoid downtime. The joint work allows to shorten the times up to 75%
Application of modern methods of analysis such as Mind Maps and Lateral Thinking. The objective is to avoid merely rational thought or behavior, adding intuition and creativity to generate new options for solving problems or generating new designs. It is essential to generate new concepts and ideas through a broader training of designers that includes strategic analysis, marketing and consumer behavior, among others. He who only has a hammer in his mind sees nails in all problems.
Application of the Continuous Improvement System. Destined to create or generate methods or systems that allow increasingly rapid and precise developments.
Design planning. Increasing the design time allows greater speed in subsequent steps, reducing the total time or term.
Use of computer processes both for design work, as well as for tests and simulations. In addition, computing allows the joint work of producers, designers and suppliers at the same time, in such a way as to participate both in the analysis of costs and in the designs of production processes and their possibilities. Currently programs such as CAD / CAM among others, allow rapid development of designs, plans and specifications.
Use of the learning curve in order to calculate or permanently monitor the times used, and generate new forms of development that allow to accelerate said curve. For this, the continuity of the personnel of the various sectors that are key when designing products or services, due to the experience they have accumulated, is essential.
Shorten times by applying Administration by Objectives (APO). There is abundant data from productivity studies that validate the increase in productivity by simply setting goals to be achieved, which is further improved if the goals represent a challenge, those responsible have participated in setting them and also there are prizes of an economic nature.
Use of benchmarking as a system to determine the design and development times of competing companies, or of others, whose processes can be taken into consideration in order to improve the processes themselves.
Application of Pareto reasoning, in order to select the activities, processes and components of the product or service that consume the most time, in order to focus on them the material and human resources, destined to the reduction of total times.
Ishikawa's diagram. The use of this powerful tool allows to visualize with greater clarity and precision the factors that affect the determination of the times or deadlines that go from the conception and design of the product or service to its placing on the market.
Constitution of Special Teams for the study of the design processes of products, services and their production processes, in order to create and put into practice processes and systems aimed at shortening deadlines.
Continuous training. Directly related to the methods described above, a rapid learning system must be implemented in order not only to acquire new technical knowledge, but also in order that managers and staff acquire the ability to learn and unlearn more quickly.
Conclusions
Al Ries and Trout clearly define the issue by stating in their work "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" that it is more important to be first than to be best. Taking time to reach the market in order to generate the most perfect product implies giving the fastest people the possibility to appropriate the concept. This does not imply a failure to properly appreciate quality, but the need to generate products as quickly as possible should never be overlooked. The first brand to break through is to occupy the generic name of the product. This was the case with products such as Gillette, Xerox, Coca Cola, among many others.
Furthermore, in a global economy with strong levels of competitiveness, one of the ways to be the most competitive is by having the fastest development as a strategy. Arriving first implies taking advantage of the learning / experience curve in relation to competitors, gaining distribution channels, arriving first implies keeping the largest portion of the market.
Getting there first means that when competitors launch copies on the market, the company will be destroying their designs to launch new ones and thereby stay ahead of the market.
The planning and design processes of new products must also be subject to a process of continuous improvement that leads them to systematically reduce deadlines.
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