A Study On New Product Development Optimization Strategies Of Kraft Foods

Product development or new product development is one of the most important activities in the enterprise.It is a significant means to obtain and maintain the competitive advantage and to promote the continuous development and innovation of enterprises.Given this situation,all enterprises invest huge amounts of time and resources in product development.However,product development is a very complicated activity.It can be divided into thirteen phases.Moreover,it is not just a matter of research and development department.It is involved in every aspect of enterprises,including top management,departments of sales,production,finance,planning and so on.Rigorous management is an inevitable demand because of its complexity.But when they are doing a product development project,quite a number of enterprises are resting on the stage of management patting heads,the research and development department researching and no other departments involved in.And there are also some enterprises improperly estimating the project's potential or using the wrong methods,doomed to fail from the start.All of these cases illustrate a truth:product development needs better methods and management.And this is highly urgent and important for biscuits enterprises,as a member of the fast-moving consumer goods industry.Kraft Foods Corporate Management(Shanghai)Co.,Ltd(hereafter referred to as Kraft SH),the research object of this article,is a subsidiary corporation,attached to Kraft Foods Corporate Management(China)consulting Co..After detailed and in-depth research,and analysis of its characteristics,the problems of Kraft SH's new product development system are pointed out in this article.Then aimed at these problems,with the theories of product life cycle and the new product development strategy,qualitative analysis and quantitative calculation,a series of improvement strategies and implementation methods,are put forward to enhance the success rate and efficiency,to shorten the product development lifecycle,to reduce development costs,and to increase enterprises economic benefits.Those improvement strategies and implementation methods include stage-gate model,funnel-shaped model,pilot study,measures for the common mistakes during the new product commercialization,lean manufacturing and so onThe research on the optimization strategy of new product development process indicates that to achieve the integrated optimization and continuous improvement with the system methods,such as stage-gate model,funnel-shaped model,lean manufacturing and so on,are very effective to both enterprise overall efficiency and fully use of the resources.As for Kraft SH,the research of this paper is more than a practical guide to the management of new product development system.Meanwhile,the research thoughts,methods and conclusions all have certain value for reference to other manufacturing enterprises.