New product launch roadmap to develop & make a new product in China

By Renaud Anjoran

You have a new product idea. You might also have committed customers. What is between you and success? A successfully-produced first batch of your new product.

If you haven’t developed new products and had them manufactured in China before, you will probably find the process difficult and frustrating.

Unfortunately, there can be a number of prototyping iterations, difficulties in finding the right manufacturer and/or components, some solid work on setting production & testing processes, and quite a few obstacles to get certified.

(Sofeast has helped mostly on developments of products with mechanical, electrical, and/or electronic parts, so that’s what I have in mind here.)

All this means you are about to tackle a complex process that involves multiple parties as well as technical assumptions that need testing.

The risk of failure (spending much time and money and, in the end, getting no production) is real. Not to mention, the time to get your product to market should be months… but it might take years!

What is the very first thing you need? A strategy and a plan.

Sofeast’s New Product Launch Roadmap Is Your Guide

We’ve developed this roadmap over the years as an excel spreadsheet for you to use as a guide for your own product launch. Importantly, we’re also including typical timescales in the roadmap, as many people who are new to product development and manufacturing in China can be unaware of some of the timescales involved in launching their new product, so we’ve found this to be helpful knowledge for those starting out or getting into a tangle.
Furthermore, it’s accompanied by an explainer video only for those who download it, where I talk you through each section in detail and offer my exclusive insights into each phase.

You’ll get all of this insight for free on the Sofeast.com website by clicking here.

The roadmap in more detail

Fundamentally, it will help you know what the main steps will be before you go down the path of development & manufacturing in China.

First, it will allow you to avoid mistakes that can kill your entire project:

• Promising unrealistic delivery dates to retailers that will charge you back for missing their timing window and might cancel the entire order
• Forgetting critical steps such as certification and testing (making products that might not comply with your country’s regulations)
• Letting unqualified suppliers make critical components, or do assembly, which might end up in a whole batch of products that can’t be used or sold
• Not taking cost into account from the very start (at the product design stage), and ending up with a quotation that is unworkable

Second, it will help you get to market faster:

• Start working on the right steps at the right time, and processing things in parallel rather than one after the other (where that makes sense)
• Once the steps are laid out and customized to your project’s needs, one can analyze what can be expedited (and how to do that)
• You can also go and see local service providers that specialize in supply chain management and engineering, and give them the pieces of the work that can’t be done by yourself or by the suppliers. Line up all the resources you will need before you need them!

If you’re planning a new product launch right now or having difficulties during the process, go ahead and get our FREE roadmap which will help guide you.

Get your copy of the product launch roadmap by clicking here or the image below

Renaud Anjoran has been managing his quality assurance agency (Sofeast Ltd) since 2006. In addition, a passion for improving the way people work has pushed him to launch a consultancy to improve factories and a web application to manage the purchasing process. He writes advice for importers on qualityinspection.org.