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Operations and Supply Chain Management

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M3.3 Team Competition: What’s Your Idea?

Nanotechnology Solutions is a company that has several subsidiaries that include the following industries: food, clothing, technology, medical, and cosmetics. This operations management task force will be focusing on the medical industry subsidiary. It will be creating ideas to launch three new nanotechnology products that the team estimates will meet the needs of our targeted customer base, hospitals, and large clinics. The medical industry task force will describe creating a new product, understanding and meeting the customer's needs, creating a sales forecast for the new product, planning and controlling the development process, and preparing and planning the activities needed to complete the new product development process.

Developing new products or services for Nanotechnology Solutions, Inc.

To remain the leader in healthcare innovation, Nanotechnology Solutions Inc. must have a regular flow of new ideas that must be successfully developed into new products. The definition of a product development process is to take an opportunity and have it translate into a new product or service (Cachon & Terwiesch, 2019). The product development process starts with the initial concept and finishes at the product launch date. During this process, there are steps to follow to identify the need for the product or service, the idea of the product or service, validation of the product or service, and development implementation. During this process, we will determine if the three products are a drug delivery system to target specific cells to avoid healthy tissue, correcting genetic errors in cells; Nanotechnology, and nanomaterials to mimic surface properties for the reconstruction of a variety of skin tissue; suture needles and sutures will generate successful products. Following the six stages of product development, it will determine if the products will be successful or not.

The six stages of the product development process

Idea Generation	Product Concept	Product Prototype	Product Design	Product Evaluation (Testing)	Commercialization
Brainstorming Understand the needs of the consumer	Define the scope of the product	Justifies the development of a product. Visual representation	Product design and refinement of the prototype	Validating and testing the prototype to ensure it is working as planned	Determine what is needed to bring the product to market Developing and implementing of the product

Opportunities to Fulfill the Needs of Customers

We have identified hospitals and clinics as our target customers. Hospitals are consistently looking to achieve a short length of stay for patients and to be able to treat as many patients as possible. In addition, hospitals and physicians strive to increase the number of successful procedures and surgeries. These products will assist with meeting these goals and have the potential to improve research and academic training opportunities for staff and any trainees they may have, including medical students, residents, and fellows. Increased educational opportunities and research assist hospitals in obtaining grants and other funding to support those activities. Medical education programs enhance the trainees' critical thinking and problem-solving skills ("Integrating Innovation as a Core Objective in Medical Training," 2022). The use of new products such as those we are selling can assist with the development of education and research activities related to the use of our product. Improvement in patient care and increased educational and research activities will benefit our target customers to meet their missions. The organization will use interviews with the customers and contextual observations to confirm our plans to meet the customer needs (Cachon & Terwiesch, 2019).

Product Concept

With the innovation of technology, many companies are finding ways to improve the quality of care with these three products. The drug delivery system targets specific cells to avoid healthy tissue; correcting genetic errors in cells will recognize the target tissue, reducing infection and additional pain. Nanotechnology and nanomaterials to mimic surface properties for the reconstruction of a variety of skin tissue will allow the recreation of skin tissue to help burn patients have more options for a better recovery time with less risk and finally sutures needles and sutures are an almost non-invasive way to close a wound with less risk for infection and promote the rapid healing process. 

Generating a Sales Forecast and Product Delivery

According to Cachon (2019), sales forecasting is essential for any organization looking to sell a new product or enter a new market. Since our organization is entering a new market, we will conduct purchase intent surveys to show our potential customers and get a gauge of their interest in our products. From this information, we will get a purchase probability which provides us with the likelihood that the customer will purchase our product (Cachon & Terwiesch, 2019).

Sales Forecast

Organizations across all industries use a sales forecast to estimate future sales (Cachon & Terwiesch, 2019). Providing a sales forecast allows an organization to validate its financial potential and future growth (Cachon & Terwiesch, 2019). Additionally, sales forecasts offer the organizations a better understanding of how the projected sales affect the budget. Once sales forecast is determined, they can be used to establish goals and raise capital from investors. Establishing goals allows the organization to think about the company's future in a systematic and structured fashion. Typical organizations want to set goals for the following months, one year, and three to five years out. By setting goals, organizations can attract investors by providing data on future performance and performance milestones.

Generating A Sale Forecast

Typically, organizations use past sales data combined with industry benchmarks to arrive at a realistic sales forecast (Cachon & Terwiesch, 2019). Sales forecasts provide serval benefits as they aid in managing the organizations' workforce and other assets affecting sales and potential revenue. Since our organization is not established, our focus will be on conducting market research on other organizations and using their benchmarks to develop a baseline of our organization’s potential sales numbers. The method the organization will use is the time series analysis, meaning we will use old demand data from our research. The sales forecast needs to be detailed enough to provide our organization with a sales forecast for all three products. Furthermore, our organization would only like to focus our sales to hospitals. However, we can also provide sales forecasts for large and medium-sized hospitals.

Models

There are different types of forecasting models to choose from, and they are unique to where an organization is in terms of having historical data. Since we are a new organization with no historical data, we will not forecast from the top down but rather from the bottom up. We do not want to focus on figuring out the market's total size and then wanting to capture a percentage of the whole but focusing on how many potential hospitals our organization could sell our product to. Additionally, our organization will use automated forecasting that relies on computers to provide us with the data on future sales (Cachon & Terwiesch, 2019). Once we have our forecast, we use Long-term forecasting as we are entering a new market. Using long-term forecasting will aid in our organization being able to have the correct number of salespeople to reach the forecasted sales numbers.

Delivery

Our organization will deliver our product through a systematic three-phase process. The first phase includes gathering contacts with all the large and small hospitals in our market. Second, make contact through sales calls, advertising, and marketing methods. Once we have completed this first phase, our sales teams will move into the second phase and perform sales call visits. They will make the connections, build rapport, educate customers on our products and sell our products. The third phase focuses on data and analysis.

Planning Tools and Potential Problems Detail the planning tools to prioritize and help control the development process and identify potential problems that could derail the effort.

In the medical industry, planning has to be done to understand the things that need to be done, how they are done, and why they are needed. As a safety manager in nanotechnology solutions, several planning tools need to be considered to help control the development process. First is the organizational timeline tool that helps set the milestones, the expected target to reach, and the time for completing each milestone. It will be done in relation to the market research which has already been conducted and the relationship established with other retailers dealing with nanotechnology solutions. The tool is beneficial as it helps break down the significant milestones into small manageable ones, thus, simplifying the tasks.

The other tool to be prioritized is the action item checklist that helps keep track of different tasks when carrying out the project. The action item checklist helps to put all the actions required for the project's execution within the required budget and the timeframe. With the checklist, all the concerns to be handled with a safety manager concerning the usage and the safety issues with the nanomaterials will be highlighted in relation to the timeframe of dealing with them. Besides, it will give the required task details and elaborate the steps for workflow processes. The organization timeline and action item checklist are the top planning tools to be prioritized to promote the development process.

When using the planning tools, several potential barriers could derail the effort. First is the lack of clear communication from the parties involved. Broken communication makes information not to be well delivered to the intended parties with the expectations of the quality information. Due to this, some of the information is missed while others are exaggerated, interfering with the goals and objectives to be accomplished. Besides, poor communication means that the members involved cannot work together because of the consequences of not being able to allocate tasks effectively and stakeholders being in a loop for any progress. Thus, becoming had to get the progress of the project. Communication has been categorized as a significant problem since it is the one that carries all the aspects for project delivery as the stakeholders and other people involved come from different cultural backgrounds.

The second potential problem expected is the safety issues accompanied by the nanotechnology solutions. This is an expected long-term problem as the nanoparticles are accompanied by a number of safety issues that might hinder the company's growth. The issue with nanotechnologies is vital as the exposure of the nanoparticles to the entry point like the skin and lungs might lead to other diverse impacts on both humans and the environment (Yu et al., 2018). A potential problem is seen as the issues have to be explained to the healthcare sectors and the patients to be aware of the possible consequences. By doing this, the targeted organizations for the business will be scared of the impacts of using nanomaterials, forgetting to consider the benefits. Thus, it becomes a possible problem to elaborate the side effect of the nanomaterials to the consumers and recommend the possible remediation to the problem without them not being overweighed by the dangers involved.

Preparation Activities for New Development Process

One of the factors the organization must consider is the product's pricing strategy, which is the best option, market-focused or cost-plus pricing. Market-Focused pricing looks at whether the product should be priced above or below market price or at market price. Cost-Plus pricing takes the cost of the product plus a percentage of markup to create the product's unit price (What Are the Seven Stages in the New Product Development Process?, 2022). Another factor organization needs to consider is the cost of production and how much inventory needs to be on hand. This step can be started with the development of prototype products. Testing the product prototypes will ensure the organization is factoring in the correct price points, including the units' time, cost, and quantity. Developing a marketing plan based on the sales forecasts will be another crucial step in the process of the launch of our new products. Lastly, the organization needs to develop and implement a customer/product support plan. Planning for and addressing customer issues with the products will ensure that the organization retains its customers and maintains and increases sales.

The task force will create a list of tasks needed to be completed and break down each of the functions further to ensure they are managed to complete the process of developing the new products. The components of each task will be assigned to team members to ensure that the projects are completed. The task force will meet weekly to report progress on each project task.

Conclusion

The medical industry task force has created a solid plan to reach its goal of developing three new products for Nanotechnology Solutions. The task force has identified three ideas, their target customer base, a plan for sales forecasting, potential barriers and steps to avoid them, and the steps needed to move forward with their projects. The task force is confident that they have a proposal that Nanotechnology Solutions will find promising.

References

Cachon, G., & Terwiesch, C. (2019). Operations Management (2nd ed.) [E-book]. McGraw-Hill Education.

Integrating innovation as a core objective in medical training. (2022). Nature Biotechnology, 40, 434–438. Retrieved May 17, 2022, from

What are the Seven Stages in the New Product Development Process? (2022, January 21). Net Solutions. https://www.netsolutions.com/insights/everything-about-new-product-development/

Yu, H., Park, J. Y., Kwon, C. W., Hong, S. C., Park, K. M., & Chang, P. S. (2018). An overview of nanotechnology in food science: preparative methods, practical applications, and safety. Journal of Chemistry, 2018.