Product Topic Post #3, Shrinking Product Development Time

Shrinking Product Development Time

This is an article discussing on how car manufacturers trying to shrink their product development time on new auto product development. As know from our text book, a firm can obtain new products in two ways; one is through acquisition-by buying a whole company, a patent, or a license to produce someone else’s product. The other way is through new product development in the company’s own R&D department. [kotler, P315]

“All the competitors are trying to figure out how to get to market faster,” says Ford's Theodore. “It doesn't matter whether it's the auto business or the cell-phone business. There's a strategic advantage to getting quicker and that has to do with the product-creation process [product development phase, kotler, P323].”

In the 1950s GM could develop brand new cars like the Chevrolet Bel Air in just 22 months, but when government safety and emissions standards were enacted in the 1960s, bureaucracies within the companies ballooned and by the 1970s and early 1980s it took 60 months or more to bring a new car to market after everyone signed off on the final design. That spelled disaster when fuel prices soared and Americans suddenly developed a taste for smaller, front-wheel-drive cars.
That led to a dramatic and well-publicized push to so-called simultaneous engineering,[simultaneous product development, Kotler, P328 ] where designers, engineers, and manufacturing folks all were supposed to start working together during a vehicle's initial design to speed the development process.
When GM was able to bring out the 1988 Chevrolet Corsica in just 45 months, engineers celebrated.
By the mid-1990s everyone was talking about 36-month development times, and that's when auto makers started turning to eye-popping virtual-reality tools.

In 20 years or so on automobile manufacture market, auto’s development times have gone from 60 months to 36 to 24 and now to 18, with Toyota reportedly targeting 12 months. Will it ever end?