The new competitors: they think in terms of ‘speed-to-market’

Executive Overview Time-to-market is becoming a highly competitive issue for manufacturing companies, and in the 1990s it may be the single most critical factor for success across all markets. A new group of accelerating competitors is emerging that thinks in terms of speed-to-market. These business units are using shorter product life cycles and have a propensity for change which is winning market share and increasing profits. Key to their success is concurrent engineering which gives manufacturing managers a say in designing the production and ensuring that flexibility and efficiency are available in the product phase of product development. Technological advances in information processing provide the tools used in concurrent engineering.