HCL
HCL Technologies Ltd

Product Design and development is an activity jointly performed by both the engineering as well as manufacturing teams. When the time to market pressure was not there product development happen to be a sequential activity and manufacturing team takes over the prototype design that was delivered to them by the design team and converts it into a manufacturable product. However with that luxury gone and with reduced time to market and product life cycle, a product has to be developed concurrently to reach the market at the fastest time. While designers take care of the cost aspect early in their design, cost is not the only element that affects the product performance in the market. When a product is either outsourced to an EMS vendor or their own manufacturing team for manufacturing – both of them subject the design to a process called New Product Introduction (NPI) which is an engineering process which converts the design into a product. In this write up we will see what are the elements of NPI and how the designers can reduce the NPI time working concurrently with manufacturing team to develop a robust product with reduce time to market.