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Product Development Strategy
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19/09/2008
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Royal Lancaster Hotel, Hyde Park, London
On the morning of the prestigious Best Factory Gala Awards presentations and lunch, the Manufacturing Leaders forum will be meeting to address one of UK manufacturing’s greatest needs – its requirement for new product design and innovation as a route to survival and prosperity in a globalised environment.
With the old industrial world’s manufacturing base comes under increasing pressure from emerging nations that can run repetitive shop floor processes more cheaply and with fast accelerating sophistication, its future increasingly depends upon being good at things that are not so easily cloned.
With the help of a mixture of academic analysis and real life case studies, the morning will be spent learning how that future might be assured.
The challenges of turning a good idea into a best selling product or re-designing and re-engineering an existing one to meet a changed specification or meet a new need have to be met in the laboratory on the CAD screen, in the modelling shop, on the test bed and on the shop floor.
Such enterprise has to employ a mix of creativity, experiment and the analysis, using computing power to develop not only the product itself but the systems, machinery and technology required to deliver it. It must be deployed to resolve conflicts between specialised teams (designer aesthetics versus engineering functionality, production constraints versus financial return on investment) though collaboration that delivers an overall optimum solution across disciplines.
And outside the mechanics of production, there exists the constant process of product lifecycle management – appraisal and reappraisal of product suitability, marketability and performance, consideration of what it will be replaced by and when and how it will be disposed of.
Staying competitive in a modern global manufacturing environment means that successful manufacturers increasing their rate of innovation and responsiveness to changes in fads, fashions, legislation, economic conditions and customer demand.
A top priority is the capture and colonisation of the high ground from which obsolescence can be seen coming and from where the need for new products to meet new needs can be second-guessed.
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Event organiser/promoter
Ken Hurst
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