Research & Development
Length: 120 - 180 mn
133 questions
Discrete product R&D management

Do your product development practices foster innovation and quality, while reducing time to market and cost?

Perform a comprehensive assessment of Research, Development or Engineering against best practices on the following areas:

  • Strategy and roadmap
  • Performance Management
  • Innovation cycle
  • Project management
  • Organisation and people
  • Project process and support
  • Customer management

The best practice evaluation is applicable to

  • Functional scope : All Research, Development or Engineering functions, on the full scope of Research, Development or Engineering from fundamental research to market launch
  • Company type : any company with a product R&D team larger than 20 people, in one or several sites
  • Industry type: discrete manufacturing industries (mechanicals, high-tech, electronics, consumer or industrial goods…)

 

Get a comprehensive knowledge of R&D practices from Top management to Engineer
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 two to three hours through 132 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
Free and without obligation
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

More than 120 best practices about R&D product development.

The entire innovation life cycle is covered, from the initial generation of the idea or collection of customer needs to the market introduction, then the analysis and rationalisation of the product portfolio.


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 Development" practices



Wevalgo business model for Research, Development or Engineering in discrete product industries


Full assessment of Research, Development or Engineering

Brief description of the Best practice model

The model includes 120 best practices structured in 7 categories and 23 areas as summarised below.


Strategy and roadmap

  • Innovation strategy: type of content and level of detail in defining the strategy, associated objectives and strategic plans, analysis of the value of "open-innovation
  • Customer and technology roadmaps: level of definition of the two roadmaps (or forecasts) and exchanges between R&D and Marketing or Sales
  • Standardisation: definition and use of a standardisation policy for components, parts or products


Performance Management
  • Strategic and financial management: cost management, taxes and subsidies, project cost management and ROI, activity monitoring and according to strategic profiles
  • Operational management: objectives and indicators other than financial and monitoring methods


Innovation cycle
  • Idea generation: management of the idea generation process
  • Intellectual property: patent management and competitive intelligence process (filing, termination)
  • Innovation portfolio: methods and processes for managing the portfolio of ideas, pre-studies or feasibility studies; existence of objectives and indicators, integration with individual project management
  • Product portfolio: analysis of the existing product portfolio, product life cycle and coordination with the innovation portfolio


Customer management
  • Customer needs: methodologies used to identify customer needs and test ideas from within
  • Requirements management: management of customer needs and their transcription into functional specifications, prioritisation of needs, monitoring compliance with specifications
  • Change management: management of change requests from the customer (needs) or internally (technical specifications, design, etc.)



Project management
  • Project team: structuring, roles and responsibilities, reporting and physical location
  • Project tracking: project meetings, indicators, management methodology, risk management, visual management
  • Planning: level of definition and effective use of schedules, resource requirements, progress indicator
  • Subcontractors and suppliers: management and monitoring processes for subcontractors and suppliers, roles and responsibilities, procurement and R&D coordination



Organisation and people
  • Organisational structure: geographical (if several sites) and local organisation, roles and responsibilities between sites or between functions, responsibility for the entire development cycle, grouping similar functions
  • People and Leadership: skill and experience levels of technical staff and managers, social climate
  • Competences and knowledge: Skills management and development, knowledge management and sharing
  • External network: definition of a policy concerning the network with partners, suppliers.... Monitoring of the actions and effectiveness of this policy



Project process and project support
  • Technical processes: level of definition and management of technical methodologies and processes (design, testing, etc.), design reviews
  • Development process: level of definition and effective use of the process and development stages (stage-gate, level of flexibility and parallel developments...), risk management
  • Resource allocation: definition of a resource allocation process, roles and responsibilities, capacity building and needs, objectives and indicators for monitoring allocation
  • Software and tools: use of efficient and adapted tools, in phase with partners
 

Example of usage for evaluation:

Comprehensive assessment of your Research, Development or Engineering management, functions and practices to enable you and your team to:
  • identify the key improvement drivers to develop more innovative products, of better quality, at reduced cost, with shorter time to market
  • compare your practices with world R&D best practices
  • develop improvement action plan based on actionable drivers thanks to our specific Wevalgo organisational model

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


            • Functional and project dimensions evaluation

              The evaluation is performed along two dimensions to better understand your performance
              • a functional dimension: how are the Research and Development functions or departments managed,
              • a project dimension: how are the product development 'projects' managed.

              The entire lifecycle of innovation is covered, from initial idea generation or customer needs collection to the market introduction and then the product portfolio analysis and rationalisation.



              « 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 top management team
  • A few technical area managers
  • A few project 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