Software Tools for New Product Development

Abstract

Companies operating in today's competitive markets are compelled to develop new products that accomplish several objectives simultaneously. The products should be competitive in global markets, offer gwd value to customers, be environment friendly, enhance the strategic position of the company, and be introduced at the right time. To meet this formidable set of objectives, companies are embracing new concepts and techniques to support changes in the new product development (NPD) process. These new approaches include techniques such as quality function deployment and stage-gate reviews, measures such as cycle time, and organizational mechanisms such as cross-functional teams (see, for example, Griffin 1993; Zangwill 1993). An accompanying trend has been the growth of software tools to facilitate the new NPD processes. There is, however, little in the marketing literature that reports on the role and impact of these tools, with the exception of software for new product design trade-offs, such as conjoint analysis. We identify and classify the major categories of software tools that are available for supporting NPD. Then, we briefly explain their role in the NPD process and outline some research issues in evaluating these tools. Our objective is to highlight the goals. advantages, and disadvantages of these tools rather than to provide complete evaluations of the merits of specific software packages. Although we describe some individual packages, space does not permit us to compile a compendium of all the software available in this area. In selecting software for this review, we applied three criteria. The software should I. Support activities typically associated with marketing's role in the process. Thus, we exclude software twls that are used in physical product design such as computer-aided design (CAD) andlor computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). 2. Be commercially available for general purpose use rather than be proprietary or customized for a particular firm or indusuy. 3. Run on personal computers (PCs) and be available for our evaluation.

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