1. Product Life Cycle Services for the Globalized Business Environment
The competitive environment prevalent across today's business challenges enterprises across the various industries and its verticals to design and develop products that can meet customer expectations. However, to do so, enterprises need to connect with customers in more immediate ways to understand their requirements. Further, recent technological developments enable enterprises to amalgamate multiple disciplines and develop innovative products from a new perspective point of view.
With customer loyalty being dependent on quality of products or service offered, this works as the key differentiators for generating income. While technological enhancements and innovations have also facilitated enterprises to offer their customers integrated experience across devices and platforms, the product life cycle services is determined by the length of marketable state. Product life cycle refers to the stages that a product passes through from its introduction into the market till the fall in demand. This can be enumerated as:
· Introduction: a period with low profits and production and high marketing costs
· Growth: a period wherein there is an increasing demand which results in high sales and improved cash flow.
· Maturity: the period depicted with increase in sales but decrease in profits to withstand competition.
· Decline or innovation: a period of re-introduction of products with added features and benefits to cope up with low profits and drop in sales.
Nevertheless, in an era that provides enterprises the benefit of technology that enables to make use of e-commerce them to stand ahead of competitors with who use only physical and retail store solutions, product life cycle services facilitates enterprises to continuously monitor and manage the various stages of the life cycle. These services helps enterprises to understand the position of products in the life cycle. Further, by helping enterprises align the product life cycle to their strategies and vision, these services ensures that the enterprises can meet the challenges of increasing complexities as well as demands of a globally competitive market.
Moreover, with globalization paving the way for a widespread consumer base, enterprises need to deploy mechanisms that can help them with smooth exchange of information. While the traditional product life cycle services used certain tools only towards the decline phase of the product life cycle, the present day enterprises make use of product data management, portfolio management, system engineering, product design etc right from the introduction stages. These services offered by the leading service providers help enterprises to minimize the time to market with high quality products. Besides, the use of these services enables enterprises to reduce wastage and prototyping costs while recognizing potential sales opportunities.