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Company leverages product change management to reduce time-to-market

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Company Profile

The customer is a Fortune 100 company producing equipments for commercial and military aircraft.

Business Situation

The client consistently strived to provide the market with leading edge products. Over the years, it sharpened its focus on efficient management of its core processes of innovation, product development, and market exploitation. Being a critical element of product development, the process for product change management was highly established and extended across multiple functional units like Engineering, Manufacturing, Spares, Engine Services and product control board. A few partner organizations also participated in this process.

However, lack of digitization had an adverse impact on the process run-time. Moreover, each functional unit had its own stand-alone system to manage its core operations. The data required for introducing product changes was dispersed across different departments, which affected the process efficiency. The paper-based manual procedures for the approval of product changes further aggravated the process lag. It was evident that the client needed a solution that digitized the process of product change management and facilitated the collaboration among the various departments and partner firms involved in introducing product changes.

Solution

• Q3 developed a solution having a centralized repository of data to facilitate effective monitoring of product changes at regular intervals. The solution had built in electronic workflow to automate the interaction among all the activities in the process. The workflow also integrated partners into the process, as collaboration with partners is important for successful product change management.
• The solution offered rich features of program management and content management. It also addressed various dimensions of product change like regulatory compliance's, cost, quality, and scheduling of risks. Data synchronization capabilities of the solution facilitated exchange of data with disparate systems that were a part of the client's technology infrastructure.
• Complete operational transparency was maintained by keeping communication of status updates and progress as a regular process. People at client would hear from the team lead, the program manager and the developers on a regular basis, with more detailed weekly status reports indicating progress against milestones.
• Automated testing tools like Test Advantage were used by experienced QA professionals to ensure bug free, application milestones delivery within deadlines.

Benefits

• Shorter time to market for the client products by exploiting the benefits of a fully functional Offshore Development Center (ODC) in India, particularly the development process being continuous due to different time zones.
• Extension of client’s development teams globally by taking advantage of Q3’s highly flexible Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodology.
• Highly enhanced user friendliness through structured search results with links to only relevant databases, saving valuable effort and time.
• Business model and culture at Q3 entails ownership of the product development process. It is not only the team members who are dedicated to a client; it is the whole company management which works in complete tandem and efficiency to ensure that the relationship is seamless and successful.
• Migration to newer technology was achieved in a very cost effective solution on account of being able to cut down resource costs from average $90,000 to approximately $30,000 per resource.