Answer to Question #201939 in Management for Karabo

Question

2

(A) Your organisation wants to broaden its products portfolio by introducing a new product. In order to achieve that, you have requested your cross-functional team to evaluate and oversee the procedures to ensure the new product is effectively developed. 

In view of the presented case, provide a practical elaboration of how the following process will be carried out to develop your new product: (30 marks)

• Supplier membership and participation on the team. (5 marks)

Answer 1

New product Development

When a company is developing a new product, two key areas need to be keenly looked at; the new product development team to ensure that the new product development process is effective, and the supplier for new the product, to ensure that the product reaches the customer.

Suppliers are a crucial element in supply chain management. A supplier is defined as an individual or organization that provides products or services to another person or organization. Selecting the right supplier for any business is very important as a supplier can build or bring down a business. In choosing a supplier, the organization needs to follow the following process.

Before signing up a supplier, the organization needs to assess various means used by the supplier to ferry the products to the consumer and the capacity of the products that the supplier can handle in a given time. This is to help determine whether the supplier can deliver high-quality products and manage a large volume of the products, especially when the demand for the product is so high (Pandey et al., 2017). The next step in the supplier signup process is to ensure that the supplier is insured. This will assure the organization of the security of their product. The third step is to assess the supplier's reputation; the organization should seek advice from other organizations that might have worked with the supplier to know whether it is a reputable one. After assessing various suppliers, the organization needs to shortlist them and calls for a bid. Once the bids have been submitted, the organization should select the supplier that meets the company's budget and quality standards. The organization should pay absolute attention to the pricing to avoid being overcharged. After settling on the suppliers to work with, the next step is to invite them to sign a contract. The final step is to evaluate the performance of the supplier. Any nonperforming supplier should be removed, and a new one signed up.

Team participation in new product development is important. One can develop a new product by allowing a special team to undertake the new product's activities. The development of a new product needs a permanent team structure. As the product evolves, the team members need to change. For instance, in the initial stage, the new product development may require engineering expertise, and hence, the team's engineering experts form the team. Later the product may require marketing input (Chan, Oerlemans, & Meslec, 2021). Therefore, the employees with the marketing knowledge join the team. Hence the structure of the team should be flexible to fit the needs of the product development.

In new product development, the product team and supplier selection process are essential. These two elements hold keys to the success of the new products, and if the correct selection process is not followed, the new product might fail to sell.

References

Chan, K. Y., Oerlemans, L., & Meslec, N. (2021). The impact of multiple project team membership on individual and team learning: A micro-meso multi-level empirical study. International Journal of Project Management, 39(3), 308-320.

Pandey, P., Shah, B. J., & Gajjar, H. (2017). A fuzzy goal programming approach for selecting sustainable suppliers. Benchmarking: An International Journal.