Acer, one of the top five notebook computer manufacturers in the world, operates in an extremely fast moving market with product life cycles of 6 months. The company faced a crisis because of an unfavorable product mix and time-to-market delays costing them significant revenues. The A case describes the problem causes, and the B case outlines the multi-dimensional solution that the company took.
The case allows the student as R and D manager to: Discuss the structure of a fast new product development process Recognise bottlenecks and sources of problems, such as specification stability, development capacity, design and testing quality, and manufacturing rampup Work through the sources of improvement. In particular, the case makes clear that a solution must attack several dimensions at once, not only one root-cause at a time
- NOTEBOOK COMPUTERS
- TIME-TO-MARKET
- PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
- CAPACITY BOTTLENECKS
- PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION
- PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PORTFOLIO
- RD0399
- AR1999
