Re-engineering of Products and Processes. How to Achieve Global Success in the Changing Marketplace

An abundant amount of literature regards the twenty first entury as the innovation era, where shared knowledge fosters the progress with a strong impact at the economic and social levels. As a consequence, the capability to innovate will play a growing role in the destiny of companies. In the transition between quality oriented and innovation-driven competition, considerable difficulties are faced by those firms, whose management mindsets have not assumed knowledge and innovation as a central asset of industries. With reference to such problems much academic research has been carried out in order to deal with continuous innovation programs, but the proposed indications have not resulted yet sufficient to master the competition, avoiding waste of resources and wrong decisions. The debate about innovation and especially the factors that determine the success of innovation initiatives is rich and thought provoking. Scholars from different domains, especially business management, engineering, and computer science have disputed about the priority of the measures to be attained to achieve effective innovation tasks. Several models and strategies are grounded in concrete evidences from successful experiences. Is any proposed model capable to describe and justify any kind of successful innovation initiative? The authors’ answer is ‘‘no’’ and we are convinced to share this opinion with the wide majority of industrial experts, researchers and readers. We believe that no tool has been developed to support the whole innovation cycle and to cover any aspect (strategic, technical, managerial, etc.) regarding industrial approaches to innovation. Undoubtedly, this book cannot fill the gap. The issues that are treated to infer the motivations of the work are surely not exhaustive in the panorama of innovation strategies. Much academic research and industrial practice is still needed to build rigorous models and efficient tools. However, we are convinced that such a manuscript and the presented techniques can result in a useful support to industries facing the need to undertake decisions about the renovation of processes and products and a valuable contribution to researchers and PhD students who are interested in the field. The whole coverage of this book swivels on a basic assumption, that results unopposed in the literature and that we have considered as a fundament for the book: the capability to provide customer value is a primary driver in achieving business success. According to our studies and background, such hypothesis can be deemed valid in both static and turbulent stages that characterize the paths of evolution encountered by goods and services. If the focus on value contributes to sustain successful business, all innovation initiatives, being addressed at products or processes and providing radical or marginal changes, cannot overlook their potential impact on customer satisfaction. In such a perspective, the combined set of presented value-oriented methodologies, namely Integrated Product and Process Reengineering (IPPR), constitute the core of a toolkit for the identification of the most favorable directions within innovation initiatives. IPPR represents a system to support crucial decisions in the industry, capable to orientate choices among a set of plausible reengineering activities, according to value criteria. The methods that we illustrate in the present publication deal with different specific objectives and conditions encountered along industrial production, research, and planning. Actually, three recurring situations are taken into account, that typically take place along product lifecycle: the birth of new products and the organization of suitable processes, their maturity often accompanied by lacks of competitiveness, the need to drastically rethink the outputs that are offered to customers.