250 engineering leaders reveal the most prominent design review problems and trends affecting NPD outcomes. See the top 5 insights below. Fill out the form to read the full report.
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The pressure to launch new products faster has never been higher for engineering teams.
Yet 90% of teams see some percentage of product launches delayed due to late-stage design changes.
This isn’t just stressful, it’s costing you serious resources. Errors caught later in the NPD process mean more time, money and resources spent on mistakes that could have been mitigated much earlier, much faster for much less cost.
One strategy for on-time delivery reigned supreme: Improve design review quality.
This isn’t surprising. Most engineering leaders know thorough reviews --especially early in the design process -- prevent rework and expensive downstream changes.
Which means this question is more important than ever: If we know the vast majority of companies delay product launches due to late stage design changes: what’s wrong with the way we’re doing design reviews?
The way engineering design reviews are done today is killing NPD time to market. Not to mention engineering productivity.
We can see from the graphs here that design review is done in mostly in spreadsheets, email and screenshot markup tools.
So, it’s also not surprising to see a whopping 87% of engineers spend multiple hours to days finding relevant info about a single design decision.
The combination of all this means critical design decisions are lost. Which leaves us with another critical question: Is the design review process the root cause issue for late stage errors?
Feedback is the currency of new product development. Yet all that time and effort put into gathering feedback is wasted. According to engineering leaders, 43% of all design decisions never get tracked or addressed.
The most frustrating thing about this? Despite efforts to bring partners from manufacturing, supply chain and other external parties, nearly half this feedback is gone. This is especially exasperating for production partners who see the same errors they pointed out in design cropping up in production.
There has to be an answer. With 90% of companies delaying product launched and nearly half of all design decisions lost, there’s an upstream problem in NPD.
One answer to solving the nearly ubiquitous product launch delay problem is clear: a better tool is needed for design review.
When we look at these potential solutions, an interesting trend emerges:
If that tool is not the PLM or PDM (a strategy only 13% of leaders think would be effective) and it’s not the mess of disjointed tools used today -- what is it?
It’s a tool purpose-built for facilitating better design reviews. That tool is a Design Engagement System (DES).
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