Impediments to Timely Delivery of New Products at an Industrial Products Firm

To identify and discuss sources of delay in the new product development process at an industrial products firm, data were collected during 11 bi-weekly project review meetings at which 42 different projects were discussed. The highest priority projects were designs for a new venture into European markets. It was suggested that manager selection, vendor monitoring, attention to physical engineering design, and bureaucratic checkpoints contribute more to project delays than do most other internal problems such as resource bottlenecks and miscommunications. A challenging trade-off existed between a well-established sign-off procedure and a less-structured but potentially more timely product development policy. In the ordinary least squares results, the largest proportion of sum of squares was attributable to the manager variable.