Exec Talk: Why Is It So Hard to Bring Products to Market on Time?

If you want to make meaningful progress towards key targets, whether that’s profit margins, production cycles, or sustainability goals, you need to be humble about where you went wrong in the past and find the right insights to bridge the information gap for your decisions moving forward.

In this second installment of aPriori’s executive talk series, Senior Director of Product Marketing Chris Jeznach talks to Peter Bilello is CEO of CIMdata, a global researcher and strategy consultancy focused on product lifecycle management and realizing the value of PLM for the entire organization.

Who is CIMdata?

Chris Jeznach: Peter, you’re currently CEO at CIMdata. Who is CIMdata? What do you do? What are some of the big problems you solve out there for your clients?

Peter Bilello: CIMdata is a management consulting firm. Most of our business is within industrial companies. These are companies that design, build, and maintain things, such as a shipbuilder, an automotive OEM, an automotive supplier, or a pharmaceutical or beverage company.

Chris Jeznach: Discrete and process manufacturing.

Peter Bilello: Discrete and process and everything in between. Everyone has an issue around data and processes. Everyone needs to define it, bring it to market, and then support it in the market. At CIMdata, that’s what we do. We’re helping these companies figure out what does PLM mean to them. And then we’re helping through the process of being better at it. That could mean the application of people in a new way or new organizational structures, or processes, and of course enabling technologies.

The Challenges of Bringing Products to Market

Chris Jeznach: We hear a lot about the challenges of bringing products to market. Competition is increasing. Product development cycles are shrinking.  Companies want to get to market faster. What are some of the biggest challenges to meeting goals for new product launches?

Peter Bilello: Probably the biggest issue is that while they want to do things faster, and they need to in order to stay competitive, the products are getting more complex. At a certain point, you can’t just throw more people at it. It becomes less efficient. Lots of people will tell you this when you start applying people to equations. At a certain point you can’t collaborate anymore very efficiently without other enablers. If it’s just about speed and your products stay the same, then yes, you could probably throw some more people at it, but even at a certain point that doesn’t help anymore.

What Makes It Difficult to Bring Products to Market Faster

1. Products have gotten more complex
2. Customer demands have gotten more complex
3. More software
4. More electronics

Peter Bilello: These are putting more and more pressure on companies to deliver — not just faster to the market — but more complex products to market.

The challenge is how to do this in a more efficient way because you now have fewer people. Before maybe you could release say ten products into the market, and if three made money that was okay. You don’t have time to do that anymore. You don’t have the resources to do that anymore. Now you have to release three, and it better be the three that make money. So those are huge challenges across the board.

Chris Jeznach: For an engineering executive, what would be your recommendation for where do you start and where do you go from there?

Peter Bilello: The first thing is: what are the products that the company wants to provide to market, and how can I modularize those products? If I can make them configurable, I can offer more end products that the customer feels they’re getting something special, but it’s really a flexible configuration of modules. It’s a product strategy, but also an engineering strategy.

And then systems. A lot of these more complex products are connected products. So you need to build out a knowledge base of systems engineering, or it’s going to fail.

You need to shift left: to do things earlier, and do it right. That way you can actually produce right to market, not just fast to market, but right to market.

Designing and developing systems to maximize their efficiency ultimately should lead to faster time to market with higher quality.

3 Recommendations for Engineering Executives to Bring Products to Market on Time

1. Modularize products to make them configurable
2. Build out a knowledge base of systems engineering
3. Shift left: do things earlier and do it right

Peter Bilello: We’ve got some clients over the years where they’re very proud that they re-engineered their product and took millions of dollars out of it. I said, “So you’re proud that you got it wrong the first time? You’re playing catch-up.” Catch-up is actually never that valuable. It means you put a lot of waste in to begin with.

You have got to step back and say, “What are my goals? Am I trying to optimize on what variables?” And usually it’s multiple variables. It’s profitability. You’re not going to be in business if you’re not profitable. It’s sustainability. You’re not going to sell well if you’re not sustainable to some extent.

So there’s a combination of variables that really need to be looked at early and understood and communicated. And a lot of companies are really struggling with that. Optimization is a multi-variable equation. It’s not easy to do on a piece of paper. People are struggling with it. But boy, you better be profitable. You better be compliant. If you’re not those two things, you’re not going to be selling or in business anymore.

Chris Jeznach: Some great advice right there. Peter, thanks so much for joining us today.

Peter Bilello: Thank you very much. I really appreciate being able to share this with you.