Background

The background which led to the Product Delivery Process can be viewed as progress toward the Xerox goal for success and growth. During the past 6-7 years a number of changes were implemented to improve the D&M competetive position in the world market. The actions taken to focus on customer needs and reduce the number of hand-offs during the product development were measurably successful.

Meanwhile, our toughest competitors were not standing still. Benchmarking activities and competetive studies were conducted to find out the key reasons behind competetive success. These studies found that differences in the product delivery process were fundamental to delivering products with fewer dollars, in shorter time and with higher quality.

Since the beginning of the corporate-wide Leadership Through Quality program, our emphasis on meeting customer needs with our products has extended to our internal customers as well as our worldwide markets. We see the need to use a process to improve our planning, to deliver products which meet customer requirements whether the customer is a teammate or the customer in the field.

We are improving. Since 1980 our product "QCDs" have been improved by 50%. We are on the right course. What we needed is a better method of combining the resources and activities involved in delivering our products. In other words, we have needed a standard process for product delivery, one which allows D&M to consistently deliver leadership products and systems which meet all internal Quality, Cost & Delivery (QCDs) commitments while fully satisfying end user customer requirements.

The Product Deliver Process is one key initiative D&M has undertaken to meet this product delivery challenge. We recognize the need to establish one consistent process across D&M that takes into account all of our existing capabilities. PDP alone will not get us to benchmark QCDs -- that will require all D&M initiatives including materials management/commodity initiatives, and evolving design and manufacturing capabilities.

Work on developing the Product Delivery Process began in 1984. The Chief Engineer's Council began the effort by defining the various elements (areas of specialization) that comprised the process and initiated employee involvement teams to focus on key product development issues around those areas. Over 35 teams made up of PDT representatives used the Quality Improvement Process to define the process by focusing on identifying the "next user" customer requirments and identifying the major activities and outputs required to meet those requirements. Teams focused on building off of the successful experience of past and existing product programs and "fixing" only that which did not work. In addition they defined the tools, computer systems and training required for successful implementation of the process on a PDT.

At the same time this "bottoms up" development was going on, D&M Management was identifying a Management Decision Process by which to manage programs through their life cycle. The integration of these components, including the proper sequencing and timing of activities and events, makes up the structure of the Product Delivery Process.

The next sections provide a brief chronology of PDP development events and an overview of the process and its key components.