4 ideas to improve and accelerate your time-to-market

E-merchants are obsessed with time-to-market, especially as the holiday season approaches. This is a key performance indicator that is closely scrutinized. Many sectors of activity and brands are concerned: food, cosmetics, fashion, furniture and household appliances... Whether it is the time-to-market related to the creation of products, or that related to the provision of product information, the objective remains the same: to reduce it as much as possible.

Reducing your time-to-market means putting your product on the market before the competition. An optimized time-to-market thus becomes a real competitive advantage marking a real difference in your global strategy. So how can you optimize and reduce it as much as possible?

Think project management and planning

Like all product creation and marketing, these are thought of as projects within your roadmap. We are now aware of the perpetual changes incumbent on manufacturers and brands, which must, however, be taken into account. Rushed product development in response to seasonal change or strong consumer demand is a major concern for manufacturers. To avoid a degradation of costs and product performance, the time-to-market must be thought of as a real project whose planning must be respected.

Carefully develop your product strategy

This must correspond to a fairly small product roadmap, the execution and stages of which are clearly defined and specified. To optimize the time-to-market, the priorities of the product strategy and, at the same time, the roadmap, must be clear. It is better to reduce the number of projects and products to be launched in order to concentrate efforts and recommend the use of human and functional resources on these projects and thus guarantee the expected deliverables.

It is therefore the responsibility of the product strategy managers to prioritize the available resources according to the previously defined strategic objectives, in order to successfully achieve the product roadmap and thus optimize the time-to-market.

Maximize its development and production processes

In order to follow the different steps necessary for the design of one or more products, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is a valuable tool offering you the possibility to reduce the time-to-market of the products in question. Here, the major challenge is to get the various product development actors to collaborate in a general way: R&D, products, sales, purchasing, etc., in order to clearly identify their contributions throughout the product life cycle. PLM will allow you toanticipate key phases such as design and also to anticipate the validation of each and everyone while gaining in efficiency.

Very complementary to PIM, PLM also offers the possibility to rethink and restructure processes and the integration of the various businesses: who should do what? At what time? In the end, it makes the creation, development and enhancement phases of the product more fluid, thereby accelerating time-to-market.

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Equip yourself with a PIM

An accelerated and optimized time-to-market is only possible if it is correctly thought out and integrated into the strategy and if it is implemented thanks to the appropriate tools such as PIM. As a platform that becomes a real resource in its own right, the PIM is above all a guarantor of the availability of product information on time. Involving all of your business teams that contribute to the product data: marketing, sales, products, R&D, studio, etc., PIM is the reference tool for delivering accurate and reliable product information, translating it in record time and distributing it to all your sales channels.

A solution that can be adapted to all sectors, PIM Quable has succeeded in reducing the time-to-market of our client Jennyfer by 7 (one week before versus 24 hours today), as well as that of De Neuville chocolates.

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Are you interested in accelerating your time-to-market? Don't hesitate to ask for your free demo.