Benchmarking your New Product Performance with ProBE®

Benchmarking your New Product Performance with ProBE^®

	How well are you developing new products?
	And how do your methods and approaches compare with the industry's best practices?
	ProBE is a diagnostic tool that helps provide answers to these vital questions. (ProBE stands for Product Benchmarking and Evaluation).

Dr. Robert G. Cooper's internationally recognized research

The ProBE database is the result of our research of hundreds of businesses and over 2000 projects that we studied over many years to learn about the driving forces behind new product performance. This benchmarking database considers almost 100 performance drivers. As a result, we amassed a huge database - many companies rated according to the numerous performance drivers.

Benchmarking your company against the database

ProBE enables your business to assess its new product performance and practices versus those of the companies in the benchmarking database. This is a questionnaire-based method where a number of people in your organization answer a detailed, tested questionnaire. The questions are relatively simple ones - zero-to-ten scales with anchor phrases - that seek subjective opinions from these knowledgeable people. The questions cover many topics in your business, from culture and climate to whether your new product process is functioning well, and even how well important activities are executed in typical new-product projects.
Using ProBE software, we analyze your questionnaire data and produce an initial report. This report - essentially a set of bar and pie charts - pinpoints your areas of strengths and weaknesses and helps identify areas that need fixing. The figure below shows a sample output page (there are 14 such output pages). ProBE benchmarks your practices and performance against industrial averages and also against the firms in the top 20 percent.

The diagnostic session

Next, the ProBE consultants conduct a diagnostic session with you and your people. They review the results and identify the causes of substandard performance. Finally, they develop a plan of action with you to remedy the causes.
ProBE is an ideal way to begin your internal new-product audit. Therefore, before you embark on a major overhaul or redesign your new product process or new product efforts in your business, consider using ProBE or a similar structured technique to pinpoint what needs fixing. Remember: the beginning of a solution is understanding the problem!

Do you wish to read more? The article Uncovering the best practices is available from our download page. Furthermore, the download page also include a benchmarking case.

Overall ratings of critical success factors
(Sample page from ProBE report. Eurotech Inc. is an invented name.)

Innovation Benchmarking with ProBE: Overall ratings of the critical success factors (Benchmarking the firm's new product development process)

Innovation Benchmarking with ProBE: Overall ratings of the critical success factors (Benchmarking the firm's new product development process)