Developing a business process for product development

Purpose: Organizations are identifying strategic supply chain relationships as a major source for competitive advantage. Interest in the concept is becoming prevalent in many industries, including new product development within the engineering sector. Collaborative supplier relationships are being used in new product development as a tool to share the development burden and reduce the development life cycle. The purpose of this paper is to develop a business process to act as a roadmap for optimum supplier integration. Design/methodology/approach: An Engineering case organisation (Genco Inc.) is explored to provide an understanding of the extent and timing of supplier involvement, within new product development. Subsequently a high level business process is developed to govern early supplier integration, within a product development phase gate model. Findings: The findings suggest and the business model strives to create a more holistic view of supplier integration; extending the scope beyond the individual firm-centric factors, the paper develops the importance of supplier collaboration, design for supply chain and consideration of the overall value network. The business process creates a move towards defining supplier commodity types pre-project launch, strategically timing and managing the extent of supplier integration. Practical implications: The business process can be used to govern supplier integration by categorising commodity type. Each supplier classification can be phased into the development project to maximise the efficiency of development collaboration. The resulting process also acts to share accountability to create future roadmaps and accountability for future competitive advantage. Originality/value: Currently, to the best of the authors' knowledge, an individual case organisation has not been documented with regards the extent of supplier involvement or timing, nor has an early supplier involvement (ESI) business process been developed.