Design of goods and services is an important aspect of an organization as it determines productivity and organizational competitiveness. This is the reason why product launches are important part of an organization’s objective to progressively innovate within itself. Design of goods and services usually takes careful planning because each new product introduced by the company reflects a substantial quantity in capital development. Product design is just one of the significant basics in new product development in an organization.
Apart from product design, a new product has to progress through several stages in its development which include decision making processes, market research and internal communications processes. This paper is going to focus on how product design is applied in decision making in McDonald’s corporation and a description of product life cycle in the same corporation.
Preceding an internal organizational decision making process, a broad market research is conducted by the organization in order to make sure that the ideas introduced in the new product actually concur with clients needs, preferences and desires (Cross, 2011). McDonald’s corporation owns chains of fast foods restaurants around the world.
This business requires frequent changes in product design since customer’s preference and desires change on a day to day basis. McDonald’s restaurants usually conduct both quantitative and qualitative studies that are aimed at testing new product ideas with its customers.
The food industry has many competitors and therefore evaluation of products from different companies is also important. In most large companies as McDonald’s, senior management is normally tasked with establishing whether the company’s resources are to be committed in development of new products. For this reason, product development teams have to convince the senior management by selling the new products concepts to them (Cross, 2011).
The senior management evaluates the product concepts and tries to take into account if the existing operational resources are adequate to cater for the product’s production and manufacturing necessities. The product ideas should also adhere to the organizational goals and objectives and hence the concepts should be assessed to show consistency with this factor.
A company such as McDonald’s has several departments inside and therefore interdepartmental communication is important to ensure products development and marketing is successful. Internal communications should be started at the opening stages of product design and testing so as to gain insights from different organizational departments and this further ensures high levels of commitment to the development of the new product (Cross, 2011).
The sales and marketing department gets involved in decision making at the final stages of new product development. Development of marketing and sales strategies targeting the market is done.
Product life cycle generally referrers to the period that begins with initial product design that incorporates research and development to the period when a product is withdrawn from the market (Rodrigue, 2011). The McDonald’s restaurants products undergo the same process as seen in the previous paragraphs.
New products go through specific stages that begin with market research and development, introduction stage where the new product is introduced to the market, maturity stage, decline stage and finally obsolescence stage (Product Design and process selection, 2007.p.67).
Introduction stage involves the development of a product from the point it was first conceptualized to the time the new product is introduced to the market. The growth stage is experienced if the product introduced to the market is successful and hence sells start to grow.
The company experiences high level of profits in this stage and it improves its distributions to its other restaurants as competition sets in from other companies who may have developed a similar product or improved on the already existing one. Maturity stage is characterized by a situation where the new product is well distributed in the market and the product is now standardized.
As competition increases over cost, production of the product is moved to lower cost sites and this marks the beginning of a decline phase (Rodrigue, 2011).
In conclusion, product design is applied in several ways in the decision making of McDonald’s restaurants. Several departments are involved in development of a new product in this company.
References
Cross, V. (2011). How product design is applied in the decision-making of an organization. Web.
Product Design and process selection. (2007). Product Design and process selection. Web.
Rodrigue, J. P. (2011). The Geography of transport systems. Web.