Research, Development, Engineering
Length: 45 - 90 mn
42 questions
R&D Operations & Client Management

Do your customer management and core processes use best Research and Development practices ?

Access to detailed best practices of Research, Development or Engineering on Core processes and Customer management:

Customer management:

  • Customer needs 
  • Tender management (for project engineering industries)
  • Requirements management
  • Change management
  • Contract & warranty (for project engineering industries)

Core processes:

  • Technical process
  • Development process
  • Resource staffing
  • IT Systems and tools

Perform an in-depth evaluation of your R&D or Engineering Core processes and Customer management

The best practices are in a structured questionnaire enabling evaluations of your practices compared to our benchmark

These best practices are applicable to

  • Functional scope : Research, Development or Engineering functions with a focus on Core processes (the technical and development process, tools and software, resource allocation...) and customer management (customer needs and requirements, bid or tender management, contracts & Warranties)
  • Companies: all companies with Research, Development or Engineering functions larger than 20 people
  • Industries: all industries with product or processed product development or project Engineering (the assessment adapts itself to specific industries with conditional questions)


Who for

  • Research and Development manager, Engineering manager, manager of the project management competency center
  • Internal consultants (eg continuous improvement team) or external consultants
Get a detailed knowledge of R&D best practices focused on Core processes and Customer management practices 
Get a detailed quantitative and qualitative assessment of your R&D compared to world Best Practices
Compare your results with best practices
Do yourself the evaluation and / or invite participants to do it
Perform the assessment in 45 to 90 minutes through 42 specific questions
Get an overview and a detailed analysis with a pyramid consolidation (question, subcategory, category, total)
Compare the results of each participant
Compare the performance by zone or level of your organization (country, site, function, hierarchical level)
Choose if participants are anonymous
Languages available to each participant: English 
Choose and validate the evaluation options

Unit price (excl. VAT):


What exactly are you buying?
Try out the diagnosis
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View the content and test it for free. Access the questions and make an evaluation
Invite other participants or add options later
Detailed description
Specifics
How to use
Report

Highlights

42 best practices structured into 2 categories and 9 domains, enabling to get a detailed and a consolidated view 

Two uses are possible:
  • learn R&D product development management best practices
  • evaluate the R&D practices in relation to the best thanks to the online questionnaire functionality

The evaluation embeds Lean develoment / Engineering practices assessment.


Wevalgo Core processes and Client management framework for Research, Development or Engineering

 
Technical processes and Client management evaluation framework for Research, Development or Engineering

Summary description of the best practice model

Customer needs
  • Customer needs: methods for identifying and prioritizing needs
  • Tender management: tender response process, allocated resources (for project engineering industries)
  • Requirements management: requirements inventory, performance and non-functional requirements, compliance control,
  • Change management: end-to-end process (formalization, analysis, decision, communication...)
  • Contract and guarantee: process of contractualization and monitoring of the contract and guarantees (for project engineering industries)



Core processes :
  • Technical process: technical methods (design, implementation...) for each technical field
  • Development process: key steps and controls in the research and development cycle
  • Resource staffing : system for monitoring resource use, anticipating needs and allocating resources to projects
  • IT systems and tools: technical, management or communication tools supporting research and development



Example of usage for evaluation

Perform a detailed evaluation of your R&D focused on Operations and Customer management to:

  • precisely understand Operations and Customer management strengths and weaknesses through quantified data allowing internal and even external comparisons
  • define new Operations and Customer management ways of working, trainings, or other improvement actions
  • define targeted areas to monitor closely on Operations and Customer management
  • easily compare improvements and progress at different points in time

Specific analyses when used for evaluation

An assessment against best practices

  • Each question is an assessment of a practice against the best practice identified by our experts
  • The result allows immediate visualization with a score from 0 to 100, 100 being the best practice score; this regardless of the question format

    • A normative evaluation

      For each best practice, the question is very precise and the choices of answers are almost systematically standardized to facilitate evaluation and especially to avoid subjectivity

      Some evaluations use a standard derived from the CMMI, others use a specific Wevalgo standard. Depending on practice, the evaluation criteria used are, for example:

      • quality and completeness of application
      • clarity of roles and responsibilities
      • ownership by people and effective level of use
      • formalisation and level of detail

        • A synthetic and detailed structured evaluation

          • The evaluation model is structured in a 'Pyramidal' way to provide both a synthetic and detailed analysis
          • There are four levels of consolidation; individual practice (question), sub-category, category, general total


            • « Lean development» Evaluation 

              Our whole model fully embeds the Lean principles; we have adapted the manufacturing Lean principles to Research, Development or Engineering as illustrated below

              Even if « Lean Development» is almost everywhere in our model and best practices, the questions with the most practical Lean practices are tagged so that the result report displays how this First Level of Lean is implemented.

               

              Lean waste

              Our adaptation to Research, Development or Engineering

              Defects

              Misunderstood or unclear requirements, innefective design reviews, poor usage of technical processes or development stage-gates

              Overproduction

              Unnecessary requirements or design features, lack of standards, misalignment between new technologies and product or project requirements

              Transportation

              Unnecessary movement of people or information: inappropriate engineers location, project handovers

              Waiting

              Waiting for decision, ineffective planning

              Inventory

              Activities or expensive materials orders performed too much ahead due to ineffective plannings or resource allocation

              Motion

              Unnecessary activities to perform work: informal, unstructured, not integrated or duplicated data; unfit supporting tools

              Over processing

              Unnecessary validations, complex design or tests, too many reports

              Skills & “brain waste”

              Poor competence management and allocation, lack of training, lack of learning loops

               

              Wevalgo organisation model

              Wevalgo organisational modelThe evaluation defines the actionable drivers for the identified improvements enabling concret action plan definition:

              • Leadership & People: leadership capabilities, competences, social climate and values
              • Strategy & assets: organisation strategy, technology, tangible and intangible assets
              • Organisation: organisational structure, roles and responsibilities
              • Steering: decision making, actions and performance indicators management
              • Process: process, operating procedures and rules definition
              • Tools: decision making tools, process support tools, software applications
              • Implementation: effective implementation of strategy, organisation, steering, processes and tools

Key steps

The best practices are accessible directly after purchase. In case of usage to evaluate the practices the following steps apply

  1. The service manager* can directly carry out an evaluation by answering the questionnaire (optional); steps 2 to 4 are optional depending on whether he/she wishes to invite other participants to carry out the evaluation
    • If he/she wishes to invite other participants to conduct the evaluation, he/she proceeds to steps 2 to 5
    • Otherwise he/she goes directly to step 5 of viewing the results
    • He/she can still do his evaluation after the participants if he did not do it at the beginning
  2. Customisation of the service to the organisation by the service manager*
    • Service name, title and introduction for the participants invited
    • Selection of participants to the service
    • Definition of dimension to enable analysis by organisation dimension (optional)
    • Selection of anonymity option
  3. Sending of an invitation link to the selected participants
  4. Evaluations performed by selected participants, on the Wevalgo web platform
    • Participants connect to Wevalgo web site thanks to the link sent by the service manager
    • Participants answer on-line
    • The service manager can follow up the answers progress status
  5. Results available at the end of evaluations on the Wevalgo website

* The service manager is the person who purchased the service. 

Recommended participants for an evaluation

For the evaluation we recommend the following participants: 

  • Research, Development or Engineering manager
  • A few project managers
  • A few technical area managers
  • A selection of a few people outside of Research, Development or Engineering : sales and marketing, purchasing, manufacturing manager...
  • In case of several geographical sites, a selection of site managers, enabling to compare the practices between the different sites.

Get instant and full access to reports as soon as evaluations are completed.

Gain multi-level analysis on several axis that can be explored in varied depths and dimensions through a user friendly results menu. A few samples of the results report are shown below

Heat map
Visualise the performance and their drivers at a glance across all categories and sub-categories
results-RDE-CDM-1.PNG
Results by organisational dimension
Compare performance across your own, relevant and entirely customisable organisational dimensions. For example by geographical locations, departments, hierarchical levels or any other you see fit. Zoom in to breakdowns by category, subcategory and/or question
results-RDE-CDM-2.PNG
Results by evaluator and category
You can see detailed results to better understand the causes of your organisation performance
results-RDE-CDM-3.PNG
Wevalgo excellence model Results
Get valuable insight into areas and axes of progress thanks to our embedded Wevalgo model. Other analytical models may be incorporated, see key concepts for more information)
results-RDE-CDM-4.png

We have expert consultants on hand to build their own evaluations, assist you and interpret your results. Select the Expert Review option on the purchase menu.



Related diagnosis
8 questionnaires