Involvement of Supplier is a Vaccine to Enhance New Product Development Performance

Many recent studies highlight the need to rethink the way organizations manage product development. Traditional approach to achieve product development by a centralized and collocated R&D team is becoming outdated. The involvement of supplier for the new product development projects gives a scope to improve the efficiency of the projects by reducing the development costs and the development time, and to improve the effectiveness of the project by reducing the cost of product and improve the quality of the product. In collaborative product development the unique skill, capability, and expertise of the supplier is utilized. This article deals with the strategies and practices used by firms to achieve greater success in their collaborative product development. The key areas where the advantages of these benefits could be achieved are Inventory, Labor, Material, Product development, Warranty, Synergized/ shared equipment, Innovation/ new technology implementation, Risk management Product improvement, Lead time. This paper attempts to reveal the key findings of data collected from component suppliers to original equipment manufacturers (OEM) related to ten selected Indian automobile industries. The results indicate that collaborative product development holds the key to achieve the competitive advantage in selected Indian automobile industries.