Increased globalization means that consumers can get their hands on any product, anywhere, within days. To differentiate themselves and, more importantly, to satisfy their customers’ needs, companies must deliver innovative products, processes, and services. Rapidly changing market trends can complicate this goal, however, as can the need to ensure that all new products meet regional and international compliance standards. Find out how to best overcome these challenges in this white paper.
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SAP Insider | Business Process Excellence
Let Innovation, Not Technology, Drive Your Thomas OhnemusDirector, Solution Marketing Product Business Product Lifecycle ManagementSAPSAP's Innovative Approach to Product and Service Leadership
Increased globalization means that consumers can get their SAP's 3-Tiered Strategy for Optimizing hands on any product, anywhere, within days. To differentiate Product-Related Business Processesthemselves and, more importantly, to satisfy their customers' To help its customers tackle these objectives, SAP has needs, companies must deliver innovative products, processes, designed a new strategy called Product and Service and services. Leadership. It's a framework that manufacturers can use to Rapidly changing market trends can complicate this goal, address their challenges across these three areas, helping however, as can the need to ensure that all new products them successfully balance their business goals with con-meet regional and international compliance standards, sumer needs. such as Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) or Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS). Step #1: Make product innovation collaborative. SAP's unique To best overcome these challenges, companies have to Product innovation is not a task strictly for the R&D depart- Product and focus on three crucial areas: ment. Rather, it's a process that should be practiced Service Leadership throughout the entire company and should happen through- framework is a ? Product innovation - By delivering innovative products out a product's life cycle. To be truly innovative, the process strategy for and services, companies can differentiate themselves of creating and launching new products needs to be collab- companies to from their competition to gain market share and maxi- orative - companies must translate market demands into bring innovative mize revenue. But product innovation is not an easy task; new products, learn from their competitors, and more products to market if the functionality does not match customers' needs or if faster and to drive actively engage their engineering expertise, skills, and tools development times are too long, product launches can value for their in the product-innovation process. Innovation has to be customers.fail and enormous amounts of resources and money can deeply embedded in a company's culture. be wasted.
? Product and process synchronization - A consistent Step #2: Base product-related processes on integrated framework that allows information exchange and collabo- systems and data. ration is essential. Processes have to be streamlined, To synchronize products and the processes used to create product information has to be available throughout the them, organizations need to invest in closed-loop, end-to-company, and workflows have to be established - in end process and data integration - it's the only way to short, communication must be integrated and optimized. facilitate real-time collaboration. This lets you establish an This synchronization of products and processes is imper- enterprise product network, which not only incorporates ative for complying with regulatory demands. product lifecycle and business data to feed business network communication, but also integrates design and ? Business acceleration - Although computer-aided design supply chains into development and manufacturing (CAD) and engineering collaboration tools have helped operations. With integrated products and processes, drastically reduce development times, companies still you can easily identify your core processes and outsource struggle with their products' time to market. Only an - or even eliminate - processes that don't add value. integrated, end-to-end process would allow total control This business network transformation provides maximum and effective management of the development process, flexibility; it allows companies to build their ideal IT land-which again would enable companies to respond to market scapes - ones that orbit their products - rather than hav-trends faster and gain more long-term success. ing products revolve around IT.
n nReproduced with permission from the Jan Feb Mar 2008 issue of SAP Insider | www.SAPinsideronline.comsp... [download for more]
