American Greeting Project Summary

1. Summary of Project:

American Greetings is the 3rd largest creative studio in the world. In terms of industry/marketplace, 90% of product is made in US and print 1.5 billion greeting cards each year. For the American Greeting Project, we need to provide a way that can more effectively generate prototypes to meet business needs compared to current process.

As we can see from the below chart collected from American Greetings, we find two key issues include long lead-team, lack of strong control and well coordinating among American Greetings, Vendors and Printers.

The Key points of this project are Respond-time, vendor-management and cost-control. Thus, the new prototyping process can assist American Greetings to improve the key activities

We identify eight steps for the American Greetings Prototyping process as below:

1. Identify customer need. In this step, we need to analyze past demand for future estimation and we need estimate rollout period based on focusing customer requirement.

2. Brainstorm, Brainstorm, Invent, Invent. In our opinion, we should compare past results with new concept and filter out past failed ideas. We incorporate past innovations and early hypothesis testing.

3. Select, refine, design. After the two steps before, we should have historic solutions for components, map product solutions with Vendors, using past customer feedback to improve design.

4. Create Prototypes. That is our focused problem how to improve the level of this process to meet the customers’ needs effectively. It is the key part in the whole American Greetings prototyping model. We will introduce the step in next chapter.

5. Ask people what they think. We need to forecast results for features, looking & feel, appeal, usability, emotional connect, preference.

6. Making refinements. We incorporate past refinements for similar components and allocate refinements to right vendors. We cut redesigning time & cost and look for more innovative

Component category

2. Design difficulty

3. Material

4. Shape

5. Color

6. Size

This vital information can be used in the later stages of prototyping as well as in prototyping processes of new products.

2. Prototype Development Stage:

The Prototype development is most focused on how well the communication and integration process is executed among the Asian Product Development team, Vendors and Vendors This directly affects the lead-time and cost parameters. So what we suggest is the adoption of RAD (Rapid Application Development) modeling to improve synergy among all the concerned teams.

So in this stage, instead of providing the whole prototype to work on to different vendors, and then waiting for them to respond to their individual process for the prototype, they can be provided with individual components of the prototype.

So why this difference?

Let’s say in the current method, we have to build a prototype for the product which has 5 components, named A, B, C, D & E.

So this product is supplied to 5 different vendors to work on named V1, V2, V3, V4 & V5.

So what will happen next?

All the 5 vendors will start working on the prototype, starting from their choice of component in the product. So may be V1, V2 & V3 start with component B, V4 starts with A and V5 starts with