Let’s start at the very beginning.
New Product Development/Research and Development (R&D), – New product development (NPD) refers to all efforts to create a new product, process or service. This involves, generally, a five-stage process of the idea generation, a business and/or technical assessment, the product or process concept development, engineering and design of the product or service and finally, the building of the prototype with testing and pilot.
A well-established business will already have a niche they specialise in. For the purpose of understanding an E2E supply chain, we are going to imagine a business that produces sportswear goods. They have every item of clothing you can imagine and a great range of bags, caps, and socks. The one thing they don’t have available is footwear. Picture Nike or Adidas without trainers – it wouldn’t make sense.
The R&D team have been their brand ‘target market’; they have checked out what the competition is doing, and they have carried out in-depth research with their customer base. They know that launching a trainer line will be a huge success for the business.
What are the trainers going to look like? How many different designs and colours? How will they make them comfortable? What price bracket do they need to be in?
Just a small handful of the hundreds of considerations a business will make when considering a new product!
The R&D team, or the new product development team, have had the green light to design and create a prototype of the trainers they think the brand should produce.
At this stage, designers, graphics specialists, and CAD specialists will begin to draw and create the images of the trainers.
Once they are happy with the ‘look’ on paper (or screen), the next stage is to create prototypes of the product(s). Going straight to production at this stage would be a bad idea… there is so much that could go wrong!