Is Your NPD Software Holding Back Your Company's Growth?

Software tools used by new product development (NPD) teams must deliver lower project costs, faster time to market and a quality product.

How to identify if you are using the right NPD tools? 

The NPD Software Challenge 

Software tools that are not optimum for managing a NPD process include spreadsheets, project management software and cloud-based task management apps. 

• Whilst these tools can be used to manage an NPD process they have some limitations. 

• The challenge with these tools is that they designed for generic application and not specific for the NPD process. 

Some of these tools will have templates that configures the tool to be 'NPD like' where they use NPD terms and some basic NPD processes, but only go part of the way to delivering a complete NPD solution. 

NPD Team Size Matters 

• Spreadsheets and task management apps might be fine for very small NPD teams who only create half dozen new products a year. 

• These tools will be inadequate for larger organisations with sizeable NPD teams and a higher volume of new products. 

Pain to Expect from this Software 

The pain points to expect when using spreadsheets and tasks management apps to manage an NPD process include but not limited to: 

Manual Handling Data 

• Manual data manipulation is time consuming 

• Moving data from one document to another 

• More time spent working the data than adding value to process (designing, testing, communicating, reporting).

NPD Process Visibility 

• Poor visibility on NPD progress by the project team and management 

• Only able to see updates on NPD progress at project meetings.

Reporting Nightmare 

• Difficult to generate management reports as data is scattered in different systems 

• Management reports on NPD progress are a manual exercise in updating spreadsheets and presentation documents

• Also, having a business intelligence dashboard showing up to date progress is near impossible.

Poor Collaboration Capability 

• Collaboration amongst teams is handicapped by private documents 

• Sharing documents becomes a challenge even with cloud-based collaboration tools

• There is an element of document management required around setting up and maintain folder structures for each NPD project.

Dis-Integrated Systems 

• Limited integration to modern software tools (email, chat, cloud apps, document management) 

• Emails, chats and documents are not easily accessible to others in the NPD team.

Break the NPD Software Shackles

Spreadsheets and tasks management apps are a quick and easy way to partially automate the NPD process, but this approach comes at a cost. 

If your business uses Excel or a task management application for managing the NPD process, then contact us about joining the NorvaSoft NPDApp Early Adopter Program.

You can sign up here: Yes, I'm keen to join the NPDApp EAP