PD-Trak includes a complete idea management solution with tools for idea capture, idea ranking, idea management, idea tracking and project creation. Ideas and requests are the starting point for new product development. Yet ideas can be fragile.
PD-Trak’s idea capture and management system ensures that these ideas are not lost and provides a simple, structured method for idea ranking and selection. Projects are then initiated for the strongest ideas and the first one or two phases of the stage / phase-gate process guide the project team to develop the idea to the point where a meaningful decision can be made by the management team whether to move forwards with the major investment stage(s) or to kill the project.
If the project passes Gate 2 in this example, the project team will continue to execute the remaining phases of the stage / phase-gate process until the project is complete. Note that other idea management systems tend to focus exclusively on the front end of this total process, up to the point where the business case has been defined. PD-Trak provides complete coverage from idea capture and project selection all the way through transfer to production and product launch.
Users submit their ideas to the system with a description and with optional supporting documents. Users can continue to contribute to ideas they have submitted into the system until they are either converted into projects or archived.
Managers review the ideas submitted by system users. The tools can be used by a single manager that ranks the ideas or can be used to support a periodic idea review meeting that may involve several managers and idea contributors. For each idea there are pages for scoring, managing documents, capturing action items and notes. The summary table can be sorted by Score to bring the most promising ideas to the top of the list. Ideas can be converted to projects using a right click menu option.
Each idea has the following tabs for capturing supporting information and for scoring. Scoring criteria and guidelines can be modified based on your companies chosen methodology:
