Cultural Differences in Medium Sized Firms

Cultural Issues in Implementing Changes to New Product Development Process in a Small to Medium Sized Enterprise

The article drew upon a case study of small to medium sized electronic component manufacturers who had introduced the philosophy of concurrent engineering. This philosophy aimed at improving product development efficiency and reducing time to market. The purpose of the article is to decipher the difficulties presented with the implementation of new product development processes compete with habits and attitudes that have been in place for many years. The article also discusses how cultural characteristics of a company can affect the change in process as well.

It has been widely acknowledged that the efficiency of product development needs to improve. In order to secure competitive edge companies must meet increasing customer expectations of quality and service on time and for the right price. What this means for many companies is that they need to reduce development time-scales by incorporating time-compression methods.

One such time-compression method is concurrent engineering (CE). CE is an integrated approach that utilizes multi-function task forces. The theory draws on ensuring that research, design, development, manufacturing, purchasing and marketing work in parallel from concept to execution and launch. The problem is that traditionalists argue that CE goes against conventional new product development procedures.

This article was not a traditional study but instead a case study of one particular company. In order to evaluate the efficiency of CE an electronic component manufacturing company in South Wales evaluated its new product development process before and after the switch to CE.

Research initially showed that the existing process resulted in an unacceptable time to market for an unsophisticated product. This caused the company to adopt CE. Before making the decision to adopt CE the company commissioned a best practice review that...