| Product Development Challenges and Solutions |
| Products and requirements are continuously changing in order to meet consumer demands, production changes and sourcing challenges. Maintaining current, accurate product specification and costing data is a difficult task, especially for global organizations with suppliers located around the world. With an increase in demand for specific styles and products, companies are facing a variety of product development complexities, resulting in longer than desired time to market.
Today, companies are relying heavily on manually intensive processes to manage product development and communication with their trading partners. Exporting and consolidating important data from spreadsheets and emails is time consuming and tedious. To make a measureable impact on top and bottom lines, companies need to implement proactive strategies to collaborate earlier in the product development lifecycle with a greater focus on rapid product design, collaboration and delivery. Amber Road’s Product Development solution provides the ability to better leverage enterprise data for improved decision making related to product development, material selection, costing and supplier selection. The solution ensures that companies track every step of the process and gain access to proactive alerts to potential problems. Specification management capabilities allow for building out the Bill of Materials (BOM), managing trim and packaging and constructing product descriptions and detailed instructions. This single collaborative solution unifies critical product, cost and supplier information to accurately estimate and compare actual, estimated and supplier suggested cost sheets. |