Reducing Time and Cost of New Product Development in SMEs by E-Collaboration Through Project Management Approach

One of the most serious bottlenecks in many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is the long time required for new product development. Most SME manufacturing companies have realized that they cannot compete, unless they their shorten product development cycle times. At the same time, the rapid evolution of Web-based technologies and knowledge of project management has revolutionized the product development process. Through the literature review and real world insights, this paper proposes a conceptual model and a series of hypotheses. The model integrates departments of design, planning, production and procurement in the company via project management with electronic collaboration (E-collaboration) in order to shorten the time and reduce the cost of new product development. Incorporation of design, planning, production and procurement are the four factors in the improvement of the product development process. In order to validate the research model, we collected data from the interview with the group of project managers of SME by using an internet survey.