When an organization has marketing teams in three separate areas, each one has a different vision of what the products ought to be. This means that R&D is communicating with three distinct entities and going through their ideas and requirements. As a result, the R&D department is being directed by three businesses. Whether the corporation produces distinct goods for each location, it is a lot of voices for R&D to sort through. There are various potential reasons for the issues experienced by the company, including:
- The business may be creating overly complicated products, leading to high development and production expenses.
- The company may be employing obsolete technology, which raises development and production expenses.
- The business might be failing to promote its products effectively, resulting in poor market acceptability.
- The company might be applying poor quality control processes to its operations, thus resulting in poor production quality.
To address these issues, the company should:
- Reduce manufacturing and development costs by simplifying product designs.
- Improve its technology in order to lower development and production expenses.
- Increase market acceptance by improving marketing activities for new products.
- Improve production quality and reduce errors by implementing a product automation process and quality control approaches.
- Adopt a Cross-functional team strategy to promote success in every part of the company.
When assessing the expenses of their products, the R&D department must include both long-term and short-term expenditures. Revenue expenditures, often known as recurring expenses, may be discovered in the short term. The organization must incur expenditures such as raw material prices or labor costs on a regular basis. Capital costs are long-term expenses that are not incurred on a regular basis. Once incurred, these costs yield long-term benefits. Purchasing a property, constructing a new facility, or updating equipment all fall under this category. Non-recurring engineering (NRE) expenditures must also be included (Cooper, 2019). NRE expenses are the costs of developing and testing new products. Furthermore, if a product takes numerous generations of development before it can be commercialized, the prices may increase, but the company might consider increasing the prices just slightly so as to continue profiting from the products. On the other hand, the consumers will also get products that are improved and developed with care.
Aside from the cost of making the required adjustment and the impact on the manufacturing process, the company must be adaptable in response to client demands for change dependent on a specific area but not all, treating all places as one. They will face a variety of difficulties that will cost more money in the future. They may, for example, overprice a product due to growing production costs (Cooper, 2019). An unintentional design defect might result in a product that is too complex to build and mass-produce. They may also diminish their profit margins if they do not have a clear understanding of the costs associated with the items manufactured.
Despite the fact that product design happens earlier in the production chain and contributes to a smaller part of total expenses, it has the largest impact on the company’s overall performance. The design decisions made by the company determine what raw materials are required, how trained the company’s personnel must be, what type of equipment must be used, which manufacturing procedures are ideal, how inventory is managed, and finally, how the product is distributed to clients. Product design’s “shadow” on the rest of the production chain must not be neglected.
The application of recent technology in a business may be quite advantageous. Although its initial setup expenditures might be costly, when effectively used, technology will return many benefits. R&D can apply technology procedures at various levels in the company. High-tech tools and software serve to minimize the expense of running a company, from manufacturing to operations management (Kang et al., 2021). As this is becoming more common and helpful, commercial institutions see the need to invest in technologies.
Technological progress is unmistakably linked to globalization. The use of technology by many organizations has had substantial consequences on their businesses, such as lowering the cost of manufacturing, creating quality standards, and making it possible for individuals to connect from a distance (Siderska, 2020). R&D demands employees with technical competence to perform in a high-tech marketplace. Furthermore, technology and globalization may raise cultural awareness and foster diversity in the many parts of the world where the company operates. However, the spread of technology should be carefully regulated to avoid undesirable cultural implications.
Employees now devote less time to activities that used to take hours to accomplish before automation. This is significant to the company’s production since it reduces the possibility of human error (Siderska, 2020). When activities are done manually, there will constantly be human error, regardless of whether employees get rushed or make minor data entry mistakes. Automation removes that component from duties such as data reporting.
In industrial processing systems and automation-using businesses, there is a rising demand for high precision, quality, accuracy, and performance. As a result, the industry is transitioning away from physical and other process technologies that rely heavily on human contact and toward automated control systems. Automation is the next stage after relay logic. Automation makes material handling more efficient (Vishnoi et al., 2019). Quality and insight are critical for decreasing material waste in different industries, as well as improving storage and logistics systems. Concurrent design and automated processes save time and enable chances for material optimization early in the design process. As information is translated into the knowledge necessary for excellent judgments, structural design progresses in tandem with automation.
Using automation in the company’s production process can make an improvement and help R&D avoid future problems. Automation allows humans to decrease laborious, tiresome, and repetitive labor, lowering operational expenses (Cooper, 2019). Companies may improve workflow efficiency by automating repetitive but necessary processes, freeing up workers for higher-value work, lowering expenses, and increasing revenue. The more manual jobs a corporation has, the more likely it is to make expensive mistakes. Automated systems often outperform people in terms of consistency, resulting in better control and less unpredictability. This enhances job quality and increases dependability and confidence among consumers and potential business partners. Furthermore, automation eliminates manual variances and risks mistakes in important processes such as structural analysis, estimates, detailing manufacturing, and on-site execution. When processes are coordinated and automated, a corporation may do more with fewer resources and in less time.
Boosting market share can be critical to a company’s profits and success. Every company needs to recognize the benefits of market share and devote itself to the daily effort required to develop it (Cooper, 2019). R&D may use different techniques to expand market share, one of which is successful marketing. Effective, regular advertising provides an opportunity of increasing market share for a company. Innovative marketing and branding via advertising may capture customers’ attention about the new products, strengthen relations with current customers, and create more interest in the company’s products. To guarantee a strong, favorable, and long-lasting impression, R&D should keep their voice, design, and message consistent throughout all advertising platforms. The company must also ensure that its advertising targets the appropriate market group per country for its products.
While the duties of each of the departments are intrinsically diverse, their aims should be congruent; otherwise, the company would swiftly go out of business by spreading its valuable resource too thinly. The use of cross-functional teams can increase organizational coherence, allowing businesses to maximize their efforts to reach goals faster and with less waste (Kang et al., 2021). Bringing people with many ideas together can promote problem-solving and result in more well-informed decisions. Instead of contending for resources, different teams will work together to make the best use of money and time so as to maximize customer happiness while also achieving the company’s objectives.
Establishing an operation workflow and collaboration between marketing and the other departments in the company is one of the most significant aspects of optimizing operations in marketing. Individual teams and internal mechanisms might be highly impacted by how other sectors within the company request and expect tasks to be completed (Kang et al., 2021). Through the establishment of a proper cross-functional workflow, R&D can easily create a strong market for their new products in different markets.
Cross-functional teams are becoming more prevalent as a result of rising customer demand for a constantly tailored, high-touch customer experience. Cross-functional teams may improve collaboration across functional domains, increase product innovation, and reduce cycle times for important consumer touchpoints. Cross-functional teams can help other teams in remaining engaged in corporate goals (Cooper, 2019). For example, marketers might collaborate with the sales department to discover successful strategies to advertise to enterprise leaders. Even though the marketing teams are located in different parts of the world, they can team up with other departments and share ideas about what types of products are common and liked by the customers the most. The manufacturing team may arrange features highly valued by the target clients based on data acquired from sales marketing and performance research. A cross-functional team of sales, production, marketing, production, and customer engagement specialists may collaborate to give business clients a tailored, coherent customer experience.
Considering R&D’s commercialization problems, a number of adjustments within the company can help see the company’s greater success. If R&D can provide marketing possibilities, the company will find it much easier to plan a product and begin sourcing. Cross-functional teams are another solution that will best fit the company’s problem. Considering that teams are far apart and they perform different functions, bringing the team to share ideas and work as one will help improve marketing strategies and productivity. Another solution that can be included to help the company grow and minimize the commercialization problems involves the use of technology and automation processes in production. This will help in reducing the errors of production and being late on the market, as well as improve product quality before they are delivered to the market.
References
Cooper, R. G. (2019). The drivers of success in new-product development. Industrial Marketing Management, 76, 36-47. Web.
Kang, M., Um, K. H., Wang, S., Park, K., Colclough, S. N., & Park, Y. (2021). Integrating manufacturing and R&D functions for better quality and product development performance. Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Vol. 33 No. 1, 191-212. Web.
Siderska, J. (2020). Robotic Process Automation—a driver of digital transformation? Engineering Management in Production and Services, 12(2), 21-31. Web.
Vishnoi, S. K., Tripathi, A., & Bagga, T. (2019). Intelligent automation, planning & implementation: A review of constraints. International Journal on Emerging Technologies, 10(1a), 174-178. Web.