New Product Development

This Business Scenario Map is designed for all industries. It shows how different parties such as marketing, customers, product managers and the engineering department work together across the entire life cycle, from the initial ideas through to start of production. The Map illustrates the benefits of the new product development process as part of SAP PLM. Marketing triggers a new product development process and provides input and validation concerning the product at different phases of the process. Product management handles the different structures in an integrated working environment throughout the whole process. The engineering department then works step-by-step on the different structures in the same working environment. The result is efficient management of the new product development for the extended enterprise, which provides significant value potential due to the huge number of development steps.

Show Document Flow

Value Potentials	Business Benefits
	All departments affected can add content easily using web-interfaces.
	Different views on one consistent structure supported
Up to 30% reduced design cycle times*	With the product designer all structures required throughout the development process can be defined from the feature and requirement structure down to the final product structure

Marketing

Product Management

Engineering

Verify product structure against requirements

Verify features against requirements

Assign additional documents

Trigger product development and provide information

Release product structure for manufacturing

Release selected concept alternatives

Release feature and requirement structure

Set up feature and requirement structure

Determine product structure

Create concept alternatives (step-by-step eng.)

Set up functional structure

Source:
* Discussions with Customers

The value potentials shown in this table have been reported by selected SAP customers or independent third parties as referenced herein. However, there is no guarantee that such value potentials can be realized in any particular customer-specific business processes, and SAP does not make any representations and disclaims any liability as to the appropriateness of the referenced value potentials for any specific customer situation.
©SAP AG 2008

Business Benefits	Value Potentials
Step-by-step engineering allows flexible processes where content is added according to progress	Up to 10% reduced redesign*
Structuring of features and requirement, functions and concepts in the early design phases ensures quality from the beginning - and that´s where the major part of the costs of a product is defined	Up to 30% reduced costs for interfaces*
Structure elements of different structures can be linked or even verified against each other in controlled processes,	Up to 10% fewer engineering changes*
Seamless transfer between the different structures within one workbench	Up to 50% reduced costs for interfaces*
Results of verification processes can be stored within the structure
Variants are already supported in the concept phase to minimize subsequent work


New Product Development To work efficiently in all phases of the new development process a powerful and integrated tool is required: This is where the Product Designer from SAP PLM comes in. It is based on integrated product and process engineering and a powerful document management system. In many companies, the very early stage of the new development process is an especially intuitive and dynamic phase, which requires very flexible tools. However, saving costs and quality improvements are also musts, so it is therefore absolutely essential to have an integrated tool during this phase too. The enormous number of people involved and the high volume of data that is created and has to be structured and managed, are indicators that the value potential of using an efficient tool and sophisticated processes cannot be overestimated. The strength of the new development process with SAP PLM is based on the concept that all ideas, documents, structure information, early process information and early layout information are collected and managed in one central tool. This starts with the initial idea and goes right the way through to start of production, and also after SOP, if necessary. The tool has one basic user interface, which can be extensively adapted to the needs of every single user. The process is usually triggered by an external or internal customer who would like to have a new product developed. This customer often provides the responsible product managers with thousands of unstructured or only partly-structured documents relating to the new product. Product managements initial task is to handle this huge amount of information in so-called Feature and Requirement Structures. During this process phase, direct and seamless communication between these two parties is essential and is supported by Web interfaces for occasional users. After releasing these feature and requirement structures, and after verification by the external or internal customer, the engineering process is started via effective cooperation between product management and the engineering departments. Different phases are supported perfectly by SAP PLM and step-by-step handling of the evolution is therefore no problem from the functional structure to the concept or design structures, through to the released product structure. This released product structure is checked one last time by the external or internal customer before it is finally handed over to manufacturing.