R&D Procedural Outline
Hi All,
I work for a small but growing confectionery company and I need to develop a standard R&D process.
Currently, we still have many of our mom and pop habits which are driving me insane. Someone requests an item, it gets worked on, sometimes same day, and sent out. The R&D really isn't there with the exception of historical data based on past projectes and we sometimes end up having to do the R&D after the fact.
Can someone share their general R&D process outline. I would like to work on creating some infrastructure so we can become organized and more successful.
Thanks in advance!
Hi EmmE
A typical R & D process involve conducting a brain storming session between marketing and technical personnel. In this session marketing provides the information about customer brief and technical personnel provide various options for meeting the customer brief.
The next step is that technical department (personnel) provides some samples to the marketing which after internal evaluation takes these samples to the customer. The customer/s provide their feedback and may choose one or two samples of the new product for further development. The technical person then fine tune the chosen samples and marketing then take these final version/s of the new product to customers.
The customers make do some limited testing of these new products with consumers and based on the consumers feed back finalise the formulation and packaging option for the new products.
I hope this will help.
Kind regards
Humaid Khan
MD Halal International Services
R & D is a disciplined approach to product development. You should have formats for marketing briefs. Those should be accompanied with your product trial details. The finally selected sample should be signed off and must have COAs of RMs/PMs used, details of processes, individual comments & concluding report. Basis this docket you can take a scale up trial for consumer research (if required).
The same scale up sample can be subjected to shelf-life analysis to decide about the initial commercial trial.
A feedback of consumer research will help you understand if any further optimization is required. Insights from product characteristics literature, consumer research, shelf life analysis etc will help you predict the product quality and behavior when placed on shelf.