These three business shifts make the demanding process of developing new products even more difficult. While more varied and early input from diverse team perspectives adds considerable value to new product efforts—particularly in the increased product complexity and regulatory world—more teams and more locations does also mean more coordination. In surveys and interviews, complex product companies consistently identify quality as a key challenge in NPDI efforts, highlighting how input from multiple teams is important to deliver high-quality products to market. This paper explores the following areas in NPDI efforts and how companies can overcome challenges and drive to solutions for healthy NPDI processes and company success.

Key Challenges During NPDI

• Managing the entire BOM
• Collaborating between distributed teams and silos
• Ensuring DFM is considered early
• Connecting the project plan to product record
• Streamlining engineering change review processes
• Enabling regulatory compliance

While it is difficult to definitively rank NPDI challenges in severity, impact, and costs, two areas need to be addressed first: (1) ensuring the full product record (BOM) is managed in one central accessible system and (2) providing flexible, secure collaboration for the entire NPDI team. Teams generally find these first two challenges to be connected. Without the product BOMs in one location, collaboration efforts begin at a deficit.