زمان چرخه توسعه محصول برای محصولات تجارت بنگاه به بنگاه

For a number of years, firms have been implementing changes in the way they develop new products, changes that are targeted at reducing overall product development cycle times. And over the years, a number of academics have conducted research trying to understand the factors that are related to reducing new product development (NPD) times. But the question remains — just how long does product development generally take in absolute numbers? Information on how long product development takes is helpful to firms for planning and controlling the flow of products into the marketplace and in determining resource needs for NPD. Other than anecdotal data pertaining to particular projects that have been commercialized by particular firms, very little hard data have been reported on this topic. This article analyzes data to quantify average cycle times for physical goods commercialized by business-to-business (B2B) firms. The data are a subset of a much larger data set from the Product Development & Management Association's (PDMA) Best Practices research. The analysis presents average product development cycle times for four different types of projects (new-to-the-world, new-to-the-firm, next generation improvements and incremental improvements), presents evidence of the lack of a relationship between cycle time and success and looks at factors that are associated with differences in the length of product development cycle times.

While a large number of academic papers have investigated factors that are associated with changes in new product development (NPD) cycle time and quite a few firms have published cycle times for particular projects, there is a dearth of information on just how long NPD takes. This information is highly useful to firms managing portfolios of product development projects [13] and trying to develop aggregate project plans for current and future projects [11]. Without an understanding of how long different types of product development projects take to complete, estimates of the resources necessary to complete project plans and the timing of product release dates to customers may be based more on fantasies or wishful hoping than on reality. The purpose of this article is to summarize past research on the subject, to present one analysis of how long NPD takes, in general, for business-to-business (B2B) products and how various factors are associated with changes in absolute development cycle times. The analysis uses a subset of the data gathered for the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA, www.pdma.org) 1995 New Product Development Best Practices study [25] and [26]. Section 2 of this article reviews the literature on product development cycle time. Particulars of the survey research that was conducted are then presented, followed by the descriptive results of the relationships between product development cycle times and various factors. The article closes with implications for management.

This section first reviews the general length of NPD product development cycle time and how cycle time has changed for these firms over the last 5 years. It then analyzes the relationship between cycle time and success. Finally, results are presented for cycle time's association with several other factors.