Introduce new products overview
Applies to: Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Guides, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
This article describes how organizations can use Dynamics 365 to introduce new products.
The ability for an organization to create new products in their offerings plays a pivotal role in the growth and innovation of the organization. The business process area involves strategic development, launch and integration of fresh offerings into the market, ensuring that the organization remains competitive and responsive to the evolving customers' needs.
The process of introducing new offerings into the market can vary drastically from industry to industry and geography to geography, among other factors. However, one thing that is certain among all organizations, is that the process can be costly, time consuming, and has a direct impact on the organization's bottom line. For this reason, having strong technology solutions like Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and the Power Platform are essential to ensure that business decision makers have the right information to make the right decisions.
Organizations can diversify their portfolio, tap into new revenue streams, and strengthen market presence by introducing new products. The Dynamics 365 product suite offers a variety of tools and products to help support this process and products across multiple industries.
For example, Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers capabilities to support tangible products that are offered to customers. Dynamics 365 Commerce offers the capabilities to track sales in the point of sale, online, in a call center, or with integrations from Dynamics 365 Sales or other third-party solutions that help you manage your sales cycle. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management supports the product lifecycle of manufactured products, distributed products, and much more.
With complex support for various types of products across the portfolio, it's important to select the right technologies to support your business needs. When introducing new products, it's important to consider that careful execution of the market research, ideation, rigorous testing, and seamless coordination across departments is executed well.
Dynamics 365 Marketing offers tools to help with many steps, and when used alongside our productivity tools like Microsoft Teams, Planner, and Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, as a few examples, organization can successfully implement solutions to support the process leading to increased customer satisfaction, increased brand reputation, and sustainable growth.
When organizations are looking to implement technological solutions to support the introduction of new products business process, we recommend that these activities are prioritized and planned early in the process. The product data that is captured as part of the business process is critical to many of the downstream processes and poor implementation can cause data quality issues which can lead to other issues later in the project and in the overall business cycle. Keep in mind that product data is considered master data and should be carefully planned and integrated into all downstream business processes.
If you are planning to use a third-party solution for product master data, you can integrate your solution in the first phases of your product and you can look to replace the third-party solution in a later phase. However, careful considerations for the functionality needed should be taken early in the project to avoid reworking later.
Stakeholders
Many people across the organization should contribute to the decision-making process and design of the Introduce new products business process area. The following list provides examples of such stakeholders:
Product managers: Lead the product development process, defining product features, specifications, and market positioning. They ensure that the new offerings align with customer needs and market trends.
Marketing: Develop marketing strategies, campaigns, and messaging to effectively introduce and promote new products to the target audience.
Sales: Provide insights into customer preferences, market trends, and competitive landscape. Collaborate to create sales strategies and training to effectively pitch and sell the new offerings.
Research and development (R&D): Design and develop new products based on input from product managers and market research. They ensure technical feasibility and innovation.
Design: Create visual and user experience designs for the new offers, focusing on aesthetics, usability, and customer satisfaction.
Engineering: Develop and implement the necessary technology infrastructure to support the new products, including software, hardware, and any integration requirements.
Quality assurance (QA): Test the new products rigorously to identify and rectify any issues before launch, ensuring a high-quality user experience.
Supply chain and operations: Coordinate logistics, production, and distribution of the new products, ensuring a seamless transition from development to market.
Legal and compliance: Ensure that the new offerings comply with industry regulations, intellectual property rights, and any legal requirements.
Customer support: Prepare for customer inquiries and assistance related to the new offers, ensuring a smooth onboarding experience for users.
Finance: Provide budgeting and financial analysis for the project, evaluating the projected costs and potential revenue streams associated with the new offerings.
Executive leadership: Provide overall strategic direction and decision-making for the project, ensuring alignment with the organization's goals and objectives.
Project manager: Oversee the entire project, coordinate between different teams, manage timelines, budgets, and resources, and ensure successful project execution.
Introduce new products process flow
The following diagram illustrates the Introduce new products business process area.
Each solid gray rectangle on the diagram represents an end-to-end business process. The solid blue rectangle represents the business process area. The diagram shows the subprocesses for the business process area. The arrows on the diagram show the flow of the business process in an organization. If a subprocess can lead to more than one other subprocess, the parallel subprocesses are shown as branches.
- Start
Parallel branches connect to the end-to-end processes Plan to produce and Source to pay that each connect to the Prototype and test offerings business process.
Design to retire
Define product catalog and strategy
Introduce new products
Define product design policies
Generate offering ideas and concepts
Assess offering feasibility and viability of new products
Define product requirements
Enrich product with details
Plan implementation of new products
Prototype and test offerings
Is manufactured?
The Yes branch connects to Is discrete?
The Yes branch connects to Design discrete manufacturing products
The No branch connects to Design process manufacturing products
Define production process
The No branch connects to Prototype and test for validation
Ensure regulatory compliance of offerings
Prepare for launch and distribution of products
Ensure regulatory compliance of new products
Secure final offering design approval
Is approved?
The Yes branch connects to Prepare for launch and distribution of products
The No branch connects to Release products to market
Run marketing campaigns
End
Note
Each of the processes have a parallel branch that connects to Define product costing, Manage product pricing, Manage product lifecycle, and Run marketing campaigns.
Note
Each of the subprocesses have unshown connections with an annotation for "1" to the Define product costing and Manage product pricing under Design to retire on the right side: Enrich products with details, Plan implementation of new products, Design process manufacturing products, Design discrete manufacturing products, and Define production process.
Note
Each of the subprocesses have unshown connections with an annotation for "2" to the Manage product lifecycle business process area shown on the right under Design to retire: Prototype and test for validation, Prepare for launch and distribution of new products, Ensure regulatory compliance of new products, Secure final product design approval, and Release products to markets.
Introduce new products benefits
There are many key benefits that can be used to monitor and measure the success of implementing technology to support the business processes for introducing new products. The following sections outline the key benefits that an organization might monitor and measure for introducing new products.
Streamline collaboration and concept development
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management allows you to efficiently capture and categorize new product ideas, ensuring no valuable concepts are overlooked and manage the entire lifecycle of the new product introduction. When you use Supply Chain Management together with Project Operations and Finance, you can track the costs associated with your projects to introduce new offerings giving you better visibility into the overall process and costs.
Due to the close connection between Dynamics 356 and the Power Platform, you can easily connect your data to anywhere. With out-of-the-box integrations with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, you can streamline collaboration between teams during concept development, allowing stakeholders to refine and shape ideas into viable concepts seamlessly.
Whether you want to use simple tools in the Microsoft 365 suite such as Planner or Microsoft Project, or rich integrated tools like Dynamics 365 Project Operations you can facilitate coordinated efforts and smooth communication among departments involved in new product introduction, preventing delays and miscommunication.
Efficiently monitor prototyping and testing
With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management you can efficiently monitor the progress of prototype creation, testing, and feedback gathering, ensuring key stages are managed effectively. With tools to manage projects, production orders for manufactured products including support for subcontracted work, you can easily prototype and test any products you need to launch.
Using the quality management features built into Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management you can ensure that new products meet specified quality standards through well-structured quality control processes.
Improved product launch
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management includes features to support the product lifecycle including simple product lifecycle management for less complex scenarios and full engineer change management features for complex product introduction and manufacturing scenarios. This allows you to plan and execute product launch activities seamlessly, ensuring all necessary steps, including marketing and distribution, are carried out effectively.
When you use Dynamics 365 Marketing together with the rich product management features in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, you can easily create your marketing campaigns to align with your expected customer journeys and track your marketing costs.
Evaluate real-time product performance analytics
Because Dynamics 365 is built on the Dataverse, you can effectively use market research insights integrated into the platform, guiding the development of offerings aligned with customer preferences and trends. When you use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you can funnel data from Dynamics 365 or third-party systems to integrate the data with Azure Synapse Link and get performance data about your products in easy-to-use Power BI dashboards.
With Dynamics 365 Sales, Commerce, or Supply Chain Management you can evaluate real-time performance analytics on new products, enabling data-driven adjustments based on market reception. This includes optimizing resource allocation by gaining insights into resource availability, enabling effective application for timely development.
Drive iterative improvement and satisfaction
When you use Dynamics 365 Customer Voice you can intentionally collect and incorporate customer feedback directly into the development cycle, ensuring that customer input shapes enhancements and iterations.
When you use Dynamics 365 Customer Service, you can drive iterative improvement by refining products based on customer feedback, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction from the analytics you receive from cases and use of the knowledge base.
Next steps
If you want to implement Dynamics 365 solutions to assist with your introduce new products business processes, you can use the following resources and steps to learn more.
Introduce new products (the article you're currently reading)
Related resources
You can use the following resources to learn more about the Introduce new products process in Dynamics 365.
Overview of inventory, purchasing, and returns in Dynamics 365 Field Service
Project Operations for resource/non-stocked based scenarios deployment overview
Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Functional Consultant Associate
Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Functional Consultant Expert
Contributors
This article is maintained by Microsoft. It was originally written by the following contributors.
Principal author:
- Rachel Profitt |Principal Program Manager, Microsoft
Other contributors:
- Michael Herold | Delivery Architect, Microsoft
Comentários
Brevemente: Ao longo de 2024, vamos descontinuar progressivamente o GitHub Issues como mecanismo de feedback para conteúdos e substituí-lo por um novo sistema de feedback. Para obter mais informações, veja: https://aka.ms/ContentUserFeedback.
Submeter e ver comentários