Do you use weighted scoring today to make product and feature decisions?  Do you use your own scoring model?  or a simple Pugh analysis? How do you factor in innate bias in the decision-making process of what products and features to build?

To meet your customers' demands as a discrete manufacturer, you need to create a product line with various products and options with many possible configurations. Designing your product line for your customers in a way that is not confusing and in the same time meets their personalization needs can be a challenge. Visualizing entire product lines is a way to ensure it is serving the market needs and is easy to understand from a customer's perspective. It is also an essential tool to strategically communicate what is being built and how it serves the market, enabling everyone inside the organization to stay aligned and informed.

There has been a recent change in the market, and you need to analyze your product line and plan a change to the current features and products immediately to address the market in 3 months.

Gocious recently held a webinar to discuss why integrating product planning with PLM is essential. The webinar, available to watch on-demand, presented the benefits of integration for PLM and product planning. We discussed how Gocious can help with that integration and also digitally transforming the product planning process.

Gocious recently held a webinar to discuss the results and insights of a recent industry market research study that we conducted. The webinar, available to watch on-demand, presented some of the key insights that we uncovered. We ultimately discussed the ways manufacturers can optimize their product launch cycle times.

Gocious and JATO Dynamics North America recently held a webinar for manufacturing product planners, designers, and engineers to discuss customer behavior trends in manufactured products. The webinar, available to watch on-demand, hosted experts from the two companies who evaluated the situation manufacturers face in designing product lines with complex customizations.

Within the manufacturing world, product planning teams are chartered to define new products to meet customer and market needs. These products are often made up of countless individual feature sets, packages, and options, adding to the complexity of products. There is a strong need for decision analytics to help inform decisions, reduce complexity, and increase speed to market. 

One of the biggest challenges product planners and manufacturers face is hitting the production schedule. You have to be careful that you don’t rush product launch and end up with a misaligned product, or miss fulfilling customer needs or market opportunities. The goal is to optimize around production and equipment efficiencies. And although changes are inevitable during production, having the tools to quickly react and resolve them is critical.

Product Planners have to be obsessed with the development of their products.  

What do consumers really need? What features are essential? What will resonate with the market?

It can be a little too easy to aggressively pursue product development in a way that drives a misalignment between expectation and reality in the customer's experience. Of course, product planners want to create the perfect product, but even an ideal model can produce a negative customer experience if you don’t plan ahead.

In the wake of COVID-19, companies like Dyson are trying to help the situation by retooling manufacturing to produce vital medical equipment and supplies. Companies like Medtronic are responding in-kind by releasing ventilator design specifications for free use.