4 ideas for improving and speeding up your time-to-market

A key concern for e-retailers – particularly in the run-up to the festive season – time-to-market is a closely scrutinised key performance indicator. It affects numerous sectors and brands, including food and drink, cosmetics, fashion, home furnishings and household appliances… Whether it’s time-to-market relating to product development or to making product information available, the objective remains the same: to minimise it as much as possible.

Reducing your time-to-market means bringing your product to market before the competition; an optimised time-to-market therefore becomes a genuine competitive advantage that makes a real difference to your overall strategy. So how can you optimise it and minimise it as much as possible?

Focus on project management and planning

As with any product development and launch, these are treated as projects within your roadmap. We are now well aware of the constant changes faced by manufacturers and brands, which they must, nevertheless, take into account. Rushed product development in response to a seasonal change or a surge in consumer demand is every manufacturer’s nightmare. To avoid compromising on costs and product performance, time-to-market must be treated as a proper project with a schedule that must be adhered to.

Carefully devising your product strategy

This must correspond to a fairly concise product roadmap, with clearly defined and specified steps and timelines. To optimise time-to-market, the priorities of the product strategy – and, by extension, the roadmap – must be crystal clear. It is better to reduce the number of projects and products to be launched in order to concentrate efforts and allocate human and functional resources to these projects, thereby ensuring the expected deliverables.

It is therefore the responsibility of those in charge of the product strategy to prioritise available resources in line with pre-defined strategic objectives, thereby successfully implementing this product roadmap and optimising time-to-market.

Optimising development and production processes

To track the various stages involved in designing one or more products, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is a valuable tool that enables you to reduce the time-to-market for the products in question. The key challenge here is to foster collaboration amongst the various stakeholders involved in product development – including R&D, product management, sales, procurement and so on – in order to clearly identify their contributions throughout the product lifecycle. PLM will enable you to plan for key phases such as design and also to anticipate the approvals required from each stakeholder, whilst improving efficiency.

Highly complementary to PIM, PLM also offers the opportunity to rethink and restructure processes and the integration of different business functions: who should do what? And when? Ultimately, this leads to greater fluidity during the product’s creation, development and enhancement phases, thereby accelerating time-to-market.

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Implementing a PIM

An accelerated and optimised time-to-market is only possible if it is properly planned and integrated into your strategy, and if it is implemented using the right tools, such as PIM. As a platform that becomes a fully-fledged resource in its own right, PIM is, above all, a guarantee that product information will be made available on time. By involving all your business teams that contribute product data – marketing, sales, product management, R&D, design studio, etc. , the PIM is the go-to tool for delivering accurate and reliable product information, translating it in record time and distributing it across all your sales channels.

A solution suitable for all sectors, Quable’s PIM has succeeded in reducing our client Jennyfer’s time-to-market by a factor of seven (from one week previously to 24 hours today), as well as that of De Neuville chocolates.

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Are you interested in speeding up your time-to-market? Feel free to request your free demo.