Accelerating Speed to Market

There are many variables that determine a product’s success on the market – consistency of quality, price, availability, and more. But one factor often matters most: the speed to market. There will always be a sizable chunk of demand for the first available product that meets specifications.

Unsurprisingly, when we surveyed manufacturing leaders across industries for our American Manufacturing Pressure and Productivity Index, speed to market was commonly identified as a major priority. When we asked for their biggest priority in 2025, “faster speed to market” was the plurality of responses, with 23% of respondents. This beat out “hiring and retaining enough skilled labor” (18%) and “driving supply chain efficiencies” (14%), which we identified in other areas of the report as being current crises in the sector.

What this prioritization means is that, although talent and supply chain are pressing concerns, many businesses believe that accelerating speed to market is the best way to remain in business. This in itself is worth noting. Focus on speed to market creates a widening advantage over competitors that aren’t prioritizing it, as the time that the fastest product is the only option increases.

Why improving speed to market is a challenge

If speed to market is such an impactful factor for business success, what stops companies from improving it? Often, it’s because they’ve misunderstood what parts of the production timeline can be most impactfully improved.

In the broadest terms, the steps of taking a product from conception to availability for purchase can be classified as “physical” or “digital”. Designing the product, determining specifications, sourcing the component parts, and pricing it and listing it for sale are all examples of digital steps (although sometimes these are still completed with physical resources). Molding, assembling, tempering, coating, and transporting the product are examples of physical steps.

Generally speaking, it’s easier to understand the time costs of physical steps than digital steps. They’re more consistent and observable – a machine will complete a job in a predictable time every time, and it’s unambiguous when it’s finished. Compare that to something like procuring component parts, which could take wildly different times per project, often ends at an ambiguous stage of “good enough”, and may require revisiting several times.

Accordingly, companies often focus on time-saving for the physical steps. The improvements are more obvious, justifying the investment: if you spend some amount of money upgrading a machine to complete jobs some number of minutes faster, you can calculate exactly how much that improves your time to market.

Because of that focus, many of the most impactful improvements to the physical process have already been made, by both your company and your competitors. Due to the expertise and diligence of shop management, American manufacturing is already very advanced on the physical side. Spending more in this area will have diminishing returns. Instead, the most impactful improvements remain in the digital process, where recent innovations have opened up massive opportunities for acceleration.

Knowledge gaps causing slowdowns in speed to market

Manufacturing professionals already understand that their digital process contains unnecessary slowdowns. Our surveying revealed many internal data issues that procurement professionals, salespeople, and engineers all identified as consistent causes of slowdowns. For example:

• 55% of procurement professionals say that access to every part in inventory plus historical data would lead to faster collaboration with engineering and faster product development
• 59% said that such data would reduce the risk of defects and faulty parts
• 67% of engineers said access to performance data of other projects would lead to faster designs
• 63% of engineers said data connecting design choices to production costs would accelerate the process

Right now, data to answer these questions likely does exist somewhere in your systems. However, it’s likely scattered across several programs, requiring manual cross-reference and tedious searching. If finding data that saves time itself takes a lot of time, you’re not making any improvements.

Another major slowdown for speed to market is in having to rebuy parts that don’t match specifications. When asking procurement professionals, we found that 77% of respondents have to find a new part, product, or supplier because the first purchase didn’t meet engineering specifications. This is a hugely expensive delay, basically sending you back to square one in the worst cases. Like many other slowdowns, it all stems from crucial information remaining in silos and not being available fast or consistently enough.

Accelerating speed to market with insightful technologies

For most of manufacturing history, these types of slowdowns were an unpleasant inevitability. Tracking down needed data first meant phone calls to someone who would dig through a filing cabinet for you and then ship over a tube full of drawings. Then we got fax machines, email addresses, spreadsheets, and CAD tools. Each step created a bit more efficiency, but still required manual searching and cross-referencing that bogged things down.

In recent years, however, new modes of interacting with data have emerged from technologies such as machine vision and natural language processing. Instead of needing to memorize specific IDs or inconsistent labels, this new technology can find data through intuitive metrics.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to find an older design for bearing with 8 flanges and a square inner hole to reference for a new procurement order. You’d either need to know the specific ID number for the part you’re looking for, or scroll through endless drawings tagged “bearing”. With new technology, like our software CADDi, you can just make a quick sketch of what you’re looking for and search by design similarity.

With this fast and intuitive searching, many sources of slowdowns can be mitigated or eliminated. Costly errors, such as procuring parts that don’t meet specifications, can be avoided. This increase in speed compounds, as engineers and procurement professionals who aren’t bogged down by simply finding the data have more time to analyze the data. That means more procurement consolidation leading to faster turnaround, and better quality designs that can be built more efficiently.

Meeting the market’s need for any given product is a race. Make sure you’re quick off the starting line by having the data you need easily at hand. Check out a demo or walk through our interactive tour to see how CADDi can do this for you. 

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