Accelerating NPD and unifying digital threads for future-ready product innovation
The outdoor power equipment industry is evolving rapidly, driven by demand for intelligent, eco-conscious and connected solutions. As portfolios become more complex, OEMs face mounting pressure to innovate faster without compromising quality or sustainability. Competing in this environment requires more than incremental change. It calls for a digitally unified product development ecosystem that streamlines engineering workflows, ensures real-time requirements traceability and scales across high-mix, multi-variant portfolios.
Our client, a Swedish-headquartered OEM with over 330 years of innovation, leads the market in chainsaws, brush cutters, robotic lawn mowers and advanced battery-powered tools. With a strategic focus on smart automation and sustainability, modernizing its product development infrastructure became essential.
HCLTech was selected as the client’s engineering transformation partner to implement a next-generation New Product Development (NPD) process within their Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) ecosystem. Our goal: establish a single source of truth, improve configuration management and enable future-ready, high-performance innovation.
The challenge
The client faced significant challenges stemming from fragmented product information and inefficient change propagation, which introduced risk and slowed development. Requirements were managed across multiple disconnected systems, with limited or no traceability to design, testing or realization phases.
Bills of Materials (BOMs) were siloed, lacking proper configuration control, making it difficult to manage platform consistency and component commonality across product models. Additionally, the use of separate tools to generate “smart” part numbers led to duplication and rework. Teams spent excessive time manually tracing lineage from customer or market requirements through to parts, assemblies, software, test cases and service artifacts.
This disjointed approach also resulted in poor visibility into portfolio maturity, launch readiness and end-of-life planning, hampering the ability to make proactive, data-driven decisions.
Our solution
We collaborated with the client to architect and deliver a phased, collaborative modernization of its Teamcenter-based Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment, streamlining complexity across a high-mix product portfolio. The solution established a unified digital thread from requirements to service, driving reuse, configurability and traceability across brands, variants and engineering disciplines.
By positioning our PLM as the single source of truth, we enabled faster development, improved governance and better alignment with market and regulatory demands.
Key highlights
- Cross-functional planning and governance: Established a collaborative model across engineering, manufacturing and service teams, aligning on change control, cadence and readiness.
- Unified requirements and systems engineering: Centralized all requirement types in Teamcenter and linked them to system architecture, enabling bidirectional traceability through design, test and release.
- Platform-based product structure: Built a generic, modular product structure with configuration-driven rules, from requirements to Bill of Process to spare parts.
- BOM maturity and portfolio management: Created 120% feature-complete models and derived 100% finished configurations with status controls for roadmap and lifecycle planning.
- Smart part numbering and data quality: Rationalized part numbering standards and embedded quality checks to reduce duplication and improve downstream efficiency.
- Adoption and operating rhythm: Enabled teams through training and dashboards that drive traceability, reuse and portfolio health visibility.
The impact
Our PLM-led transformation enabled the client to achieve measurable improvements in speed, quality and collaboration across its global product development lifecycle. By unifying requirements, systems engineering and configuration into a single digital thread, the solution accelerated decision-making, reduced complexity and empowered scalable innovation across a high-variance portfolio, while preserving traceability and control.
Accelerated development at scale
- Delivered a 40–50% productivity boost in engineering workflows through reuse, automation and streamlined configuration.
- Enabled faster time-to-market by institutionalizing portfolio maturity controls and improving visibility across launch and phase-out cycles.
Improved quality and reduced risk
- Established end-to-end traceability from market requirements to validation and service artifacts, minimizing rework and regulatory exposure.
- Embedded governance and version control into configuration models, ensuring consistency across variants and product lines.
Enhanced collaboration and reuse
- Increased platform commonality and modular reuse, significantly reducing engineering hours and BOM complexity.
- Fostered early alignment across Product, Engineering, Manufacturing and Service through a shared systems model and lifecycle integration.
Future-ready evolution
- Co-developing next-phase extensions to integrate MBSE assets, software/hardware baselines, test results, technical content and service BOMs.
- Advancing analytics for portfolio planning, battery and robotics alignment and supplier collaboration, anchored in Teamcenter PLM as the digital backbone.
HCLTech continues to support the client’s evolution toward a resilient, intelligent NPD engine, empowering their vision for smart, sustainable and connected outdoor equipment.
