Operations Management: Product and Service Management

The course on Operations Management and the Organization is part of the Operations Management Training Program which includes a number of eight sections also presented as individual courses for your convenience.

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FAQs

The Operations Management Training Program includes a number of eight sections also presented as individual courses for your convenience.

Product and service management provides support for a company's products or services. This management function also conceives and executes strategies for these outputs to ensure that they are successful.

Use this to review the four stages of the product life cycle and the actions that should occur at each stage.

Think of a product or service that your organization provides. Now think about the recurring activities that manage and support that product or service.

These activities are known as product and service management. Your company might not classify these activities under the product and service management umbrella, but every organization carries out this management practice.

Understanding the product life cycle is a crucial step in formulating a successful product strategy. Operations management is responsible for the majority of the stages in the life cycle, with marketing handling the remainder.

But it's essential that for each stage of the product life cycle, both operations and marketing are aligned and communicate in an effective manner with each other. This relationship is extremely important – it can determine whether a product strategy is successful or not.

The Product and Service Life Cycle

Developing new products and services is a vital activity for companies to remain competitive. Significant resources are allocated to this area, and several approaches have been formulated to develop new products.

Some of these approaches are basic and less strategic in their purpose and execution than others. These approaches are typically used by new or inexperienced companies. Other, more strategic approaches are used by large, experienced companies and involve detailed planning and research.

Use this to prepare a business case for a product concept.

There is a simple business truism: a product or service company is only as strong as the products or services it provides. This is why companies invest so much money and time in developing new products. The success or failure of a product can have serious implications for a company, which is why the company will make every effort to choose the correct approach to develop a new product or service.

Now that various methods for developing new products have been explored, it's time to focus on the most widely accepted one – the New Product Development, or NPD, method. It's a market-led approach to product design and development, and forms part of a company's critically important innovation function.

The first best practice in NPD is supplier involvement, which encourages suppliers to play an integrated role in product development. The second is cross-functional teams, which involves the creation of product development teams consisting of key people in various functional areas.

The third is concurrent engineering and process integration where tasks are run in parallel to reduce manufacturing costs. The final best practice is strategic management of development projects, which integrate new products into the company's current portfolio.

New Products and Services Development

Managing existing and mature products and services requires a different approach than managing the NPD process. There are three strategies for doing this: maintenance, revitalization, and rationalization.

Maintenance approaches deal with both core and secondary products, and usually require very little oversight. The three maintenance approaches are to stay the course, reduce the scope, and defend your market share.

Use this to remind you of the strategies and approaches for managing existing and mature products and services.

The new product development, or NPD, process deals with the management of new products and services, and the associated challenges, solutions, and pitfalls. But when it comes to existing and mature products, some very different, and sometimes challenging, managerial strategies are required. The three types of strategies are maintenance, revitalization, and rationalization, and each has a number of approaches that can be applied.

The second type of strategy for managing existing and mature products is revitalization. This requires lots of planning and supervision, and is the most commonly used strategy when managing existing and mature products.

Its purpose is to revitalize the sales of products that should be performing strongly but, for various reasons, have instead started to falter and decline. There are three revitalization approaches: make changes to your product that add value; reposition your product; and extend the customer base.

Rationalization is the third strategy for managing existing and mature products, and it should be applied to all product lines. Rationalization seeks to keep the product lines operating in a lean and efficient manner, while also ensuring that they properly align with the long term goals the company has set for them. The rationalization process begins with an examination of a product or a product portfolio. The purpose is to identify where beneficial opportunities can be achieved and wasteful processes pruned.

Managing Existing and Mature Products and Services

In this course, the complexities, differences, and nuances of product and service management, are presented in a deliberately scaled-back manner for instructional and training purposes.

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