Bridging Development and Operations: A Model to Improve New Product Innovation Practices and Manufacturing Readiness

In today’s ever-changing competitive markets, organizations need to stay competitive to maintain their market position, which sets the expectation of flexibility towards new technology adoption and the introduction of products that are coupled with innovation and consistency. The focus is not just on a timely market launch. Factors such as product development cycle time, meeting quality expectations, manufacturing readiness, and a solid execution plan to achieve product cost targets determine the success of new product releases. Though other factors may define New Product Introduction (NPI) success, this research is primarily focused on bridging development and operations within an organization to analyze and improve innovation practices during new product development, identifying the key factors for successful NPI. From literature reviews, four factors were identified: collaborating with operations early in development phases, NPI team establishment, usage of digital methods, and organizational support environment. Various hypotheses were developed based on the literature and tested through a questionnaire survey. The collected data were analyzed. Findings and recommendations are shared towards enhancing the new product development and introduction success rate with product technical documentation and training efficiency.