One thing is for sure, you don’t want to manage your engineering information and data using antiquated processes, especially as you’re about to bring a new, innovative product to life. Embracing digital transformation and adopting cloud technologies is an improvement to your business model. Some of the key benefits include increased customer satisfaction, a higher-quality user experience, and improved collaboration and communication—most importantly, it enables future digital growth. Digital transformation is a cost-effective way of executing NPI for organizations to shorten product lifecycles, reduce supply chain volatility, and assess future risk, and inventory risk.

With the challenges and complexities of NPI, the manufacturing industry must constantly meet increasing demands for faster delivery and heightened production. Cloud technology can help manufacturers meet these needs. The Cloud not only allows your business to simplify operations but also helps to increase your business agility.

Overall, the Cloud can be applied to all stages of the NPI process—from ideation to manufacturing.

Product lifecycle management (PLM) encompasses the strategic management of a product from its inception to retirement. It involves managing product information, processes, and people throughout the product’s lifecycle. PLM software enables effective collaboration and coordination among cross-functional teams, facilitates product innovation, and optimizes decision-making to drive product success. With PLM, you can effectively manage product specifications, track changes, streamline documentation, and ensure regulatory compliance.

A quality management system (QMS) provides an organization with a set of processes, policies, and procedures designed to ensure consistent quality across all stages of product development and manufacturing. QMS helps organizations meet regulatory requirements, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction. By implementing a robust QMS solution, you can minimize defects, reduce rework, and deliver products that meet or exceed customer expectations. Quality management plays a critical role in maintaining quality control throughout the manufacturing phase, ensuring that your product meets the highest standards.

During the design and development phase, PLM enables cross-functional teams to access and share critical product information, track design changes, and maintain version control. This streamlined communication ensures that everyone is working with the most current information, minimizing errors, and ensuring design accuracy.

PLM software centralizes product information and streamlines design processes to launch quality products faster. Cloud-native PLM supports agile processes enabling you to take your product and system development projects and break them into iterative projects so you can quickly test and learn from them. Incorporating agile methodology into your product development can help you increase customer satisfaction while improving efficiency.

QMS software also ensures that quality standards are maintained throughout the entire process. It establishes protocols for design reviews, risk assessments, and testing procedures. By incorporating QMS practices during the design and development phase, you can identify and resolve potential issues early on, reducing rework and costly delays.

Product lifecycle management and quality management are integral components of the NPI process. They provide systematic approaches to ensure product quality, compliance, and continuous improvement throughout the entire lifecycle of the product. When it comes to collaboration or having the latest design revision ready to move to the next stage, or ensuring external suppliers and manufacturers are all working from the most current and approved designs, a PLM solution is vital to the NPI process. A quality system is key to embedding quality information, processes, and most importantly, quality control across NPI and operations.

Closed-loop quality management lets you connect product development records or performance information to quality processes in a single system—always with the goal of improving quality. Every manufacturing company has some sort of corrective and preventive action (CAPA) mechanism for nonconformances, in addition to an auditing process to ensure standards for quality and training are being met. Oftentimes, many companies do not effectively capture all the nonconformances identified in manufacturing into a central system. By moving to a single product-centric QMS solution for managing nonconformances, these gaps can be eliminated.

Depending on the product, connecting your customer feedback directly to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform can help you accelerate the analysis and resolution process to save time and money. More importantly, if your company develops medical devices, your product has a greater effect on patient health—linking your complaint systems to your QMS environment can save lives. Smart companies link their CRM and QMS platforms to streamline and speed up the customer feedback loop.

Designing, developing, and launching a product involves a series of complex processes that require careful planning and execution. By understanding the NPI process and incorporating PLM and QMS practices, you can increase your chances of success and faster time to market.

The NPI process provides a structured framework to guide your product development journey, from idea generation to market launch. PLM streamlines information management and collaboration throughout the product’s lifecycle—QMS ensures quality control at every stage.

The Arena product development platform provides connected PLM and QMS processes in the Cloud. Remote teams, manufacturing contractors, and supply chain partners can easily collaborate by having access to the latest product and quality information anytime and anywhere they need.

Arena can help you streamline product launch processes, so you reduce costs, speed time to market, and help your organization gain first-mover advantages in the marketplace.

Learn more about how Arena can help you deliver innovative products faster and more efficiently.