Product Realization: What is It and How is it Achieved?

The term product realization might not be one that’s familiar to you, but you probably have a rough understanding of what it means without even knowing it. The idea behind product realization revolves around a product being dreamed up, designed, and produced with the customer receiving the final product in that released version.

The ISO 9001:2008 is a certifiable quality standard that confirms the appropriate procedures and steps were taken to develop a product, check it for quality control issues, and then bring the product to market for end customers to use.

How is Product Realization Assessed?

At the beginning of the product’s conception, there will be sketches of how it will look, what the objective of the product will be, details written up about what works are to be carried out to create the product, and the specifications of the product that’s going to be produced.

The idea with the notes is to guide the development process, but also to know when the goal for the product has been achieved or not. When the quality control team get their hands on early prototypes and the supposed final version before going into mass production to satisfy customers’ demand, they compare what were the original goals and purpose of the product was against what they have in front of them, and then put the product through its paces.

What Happens When a Products Fails to Meet Its Original Design Ideals?

When a product was designed to solve a particular problem, or make something easier and this is spelled out in the initial plans, then the QC team can look at the final product through this exacting lens to decide whether the designers have achieved this goal or if it’s time to delay the launch to work on the development some more first.

Indeed, Altium is one company that works hard to ensure that each new software release is quality control tested and meets their design and feature objectives. It’s usually the only way to keep programmers and designers accountable other than being customer-facing in the new features they consider adding by surveying users first.

Is Product Realization Important?

Quality control is intended to improve results, not make life more difficult. In the case of product realization, when there are benchmarks set and feature quality specifics agreed in advance, quality control personnel have a clear line of analysis to examine whether the product met it’s brief or fell short. When using realization principles, companies can ensure that initial goals are met with the hard reality later to avoid continually falling short of the market.

Without setting the standards for what is expected from each product development, it’s not possible to know whether the team performed well or not; only that they completed the task. When competing with eager competitors who’d like nothing more than to take your market share, no company can afford to fall short on their product realization goals.

The team at Altium certainly understand this when developing the latest version of their PCB design software. When you’ve been updating a software package as many times as they have, working on the cutting-edge ensures customers get a design app that matches their needs.