RESOURCES
Product Lifecycle Management
SYNOPSIS
Neglect of product lifecycle management (PLM) leads to the loss of opportunities, a significant decrease in the product's life cycle or even worse – the product's quick disappearance from the market. The good news is that our Product Lifecycle Management deck is designed to aid managers' product and sales improvement efforts and help them assign priorities, schedule future production expansion and marketing initiatives, preplan flattening sales curves and ensure the product's ongoing success.
PREVIEW
TOOL HIGHLIGHTS
Communicate the benefits of product cycle management to your team. They may include: improved product quality and brand reputation, reduced prototyping costs, discovery of sales opportunities and revenue contributions and more.
Apply lean business process management principles in your product lifecycle management, as Lean BPM works in every stage of the PLM process, putting continuous improvement in the forefront of every stage.
When creating and evaluating your PLM roadmap, take into account the following: innovation, order-delivery time, cycle time, product life, waste and reliability, warranty claims, the accuracy of provisioning and customer feedback.
OVERVIEW
The product life cycle is the process of a product going from launch to decline or removal from the market. It is true that some products stay in a maturity state for a long period of time, however, all products eventually phase-out of the market because of several factors, such as saturation, competition, trends' shift, decrease in demand and sales.
APPLICATION
Per Theodore Levitt, a professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School, the following are the four stages of the Product Life Cycle:
Market Development – the period when a new product is first introduced to the market with a proven demand for it, but without the full proof of technically in all respects. At this stage, sales are usually low and increase slowly.
Market Growth (a.k.a. "Takeoff Stage") – the period when demand begins to accelerate and the size of the total market expands rapidly.
Market Maturity – the period when demand evens out and grows, mostly only at the replacement and new family-formation rate.
Market Decline – the period when the product begins to lose its appeal to consumers and sales drop.
CASE STUDY
Plum organic baby snacks
IDEO, an innovation-focused design and consulting firm, helped organic baby food producer, Plum, rethink the all-familiar baby food packaging.
According to the IDEO website, "Plum approached IDEO for help designing a non-pouch package that could showcase the vibrancy of the ingredients within."
IDEO gathered vital insights that aided prototype production and the final design. For example, the fact that nothing can replace the feeling of making an intimate connection with a child through spoon-feeding. Or that baby food is often wasted if a parent can't remember how long a product has been in the fridge. Or that families struggle with how to spoon-feed their children on the go without making a mess. Keeping all this information in mind, the IDEO team came up with a transparent bowl that allows consumers to see the natural color of Plum's food. "A resealable lid makes it easy for parents to store food between feedings, and the container includes a feature that allows them to track the day that they opened the pack to ensure that they don't end up throwing away perfectly good food. Lastly, the new package is easily and safely stackable and includes a divot in the lid for parents to rest a spoon on, making for a much cleaner and more sanitary feeding experience," IDEO shares on their website.