Our Product Development Assessment (PDA) methodology is used to benchmark and assess your organization's development process against 260 best practices for product development. This assessment serves as a benchmark and identifies the highest impact opportunities for further improvement. This overall methodology is described in Benchmarking Best Practices to Improve Product Development. The assessment would typically take one to three weeks depending upon the organization's size and the complexity of the development process. Prior to conducting the assessment, we would review your organization chart and any other descriptive material you provide and discuss your product development environment by phone. Based on this, we would typically conduct four to ten days of interviews, walk-through's, and process reviews. Twenty-eight product development dimensions are addressed:

• Business and Product Strategy
• Product and Pipeline Management
• Technology Management
• Management and Leadership
• Early Involvement
• Product Development Teams
• Organizational Environment
• Process Management
• Process Improvement
• Understanding the Customer
• Requirements and Specifications Management
• Development Process Integration
• Supplier/Subcontractor Integration
• Product Launch
• Configuration Management
• Design Assurance
• Project & Resource Management
• Design for Manufacturability
• Product Cost Management
• Robust Design
• Integrated Test Design and Program
• Design for Operation and Support
• Product Data
• Design Automation
• Simulation and Analysis
• Computer-Aided Manufacturing
• Support Technology
• Knowledge Management

At the conclusion of this review, we will sit down with you and other members of your management team to offer specific recommendations as well as debrief you using our assessment forms. Where necessary, we would explain certain IPD concepts to your management team so that they would understand why a recommended improvement was appropriate. We can discuss priorities based on gap analysis (weak rating versus a strong importance of the dimension), dimensions that seem out of balance, and our experience. We can then help develop a preliminary action plan to "close the gap" and improve in areas related to the company's critical success factors. We will leave a copy of our Product Development Best Practices and Assessment software with you so that you can perform on-going self-assessments in the future. Training in this benchmarking and assessment methodology is also available.

This feedback can identify specific opportunities to improve the product development process and can result in significant reductions in development/modification costs, product costs, and engineering changes as well as improved product quality and time-to-market. This assessment and the subsequent improvement efforts can pay for themselves many times over.