Channel Viewpoint
Before we give you information on what we do in product branding, design, marketing and merchandising, it is important to know we believe you only measure success by a reorder of your products--not the original order to the retail channel. Most customers can get the first order but end up price-protecting and/or having to take the product back in stock rotation or worse, a refund.
Who Are We
Our product group teams are specialists in product development, helping our clients to optimize the process of developing products and services. With years of practical product design, development and the launch of over 400 successful products, we offer reality when it comes to value-added insight that is time tested from a first-hand understanding of channel challenges that face our clients. Most importantly, our proven approach in product development marketing and deployment solutions that speed time-to-market and increase customer acceptance enables our clients to stay competitive and create solid sell-through.
Custom Development
TeraFact offers solutions that are “Best in Class.” We take all our clients' objectives and operational assets and customize the best solution to fit our clients' objectives. Unlike many consulting firms that only want to find clients that are Fortune 100 with deep pockets, we are committed to assisting clients that are the heart and soul of the free enterprise economy. In our years of experience we have launched many Fortune 500 company's products to the retail channel, but we believe companies that are being formed with innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit will be the next generation.
Collaboration is Key
Collaboration is key in everything we do, from the way we work with our clients, to building consensus, managing supply chain operations and bringing our clients together with their customers, partners and suppliers. Leveraging the critical links among internal operations and external cross-dock supply management is key to ensuring that your organization, resources, processes and plans are properly aligned to meet profitable business objectives.
What you Get
TeraFact's professionals will work side by side with you to evaluate your products, marketing plan, technical support, and quantify assurance services. TeraFact has years of hands-on experience in fulfillment management to assist you in finding the most profitable way to launch or tweak your channel approach.
Our beginning
TeraFact, Inc. located in Dallas, Texas. With a primary business in Information Technologies, they found that most customers they support with IT services needed some sort of product or service in product design, launch and marketing. With that in mind, TeraFact began a division with the goal of turning product ideas into market place realities. A strong technical service offering and the addition of marketing services brings the best of both worlds to a client offering technical solutions for efficiency and world class marketing and product design to our clients. It only makes sense that the technical and the merchandising arenas converge for efficiencies in product deployment, tracking, accounting and support. Without both critical parts in place, a client will eventually fail no matter how good the product currently is.
TeraFact is successfully assisting its clients in carrying out their mission to yield tangible results in product development and merchandising while increasing bottom line growth and improvement.
Business Development
Are your products in the right markets? Are customers satisfied with your new product innovations? Have revenue and market share been flat for too long? With the right approach to business development you can do away with frustrating performance and mobilize your product development organization.
As companies shorten time-to-market, time-to-ramp and time-to-profitability, product development organizations feel the pressure. Couple this with increased competition and market demand for more and more features with greater functional complexity and the squeeze is on.
How do you ensure that your company continues to experience revenue and market share growth in this demanding environment? How do you ensure the right business strategy for your markets today and tomorrow?
At TeraFact, we take a very pragmatic approach to achieving growth by helping product development organizations combine innovation in products, technologies and processes with time tested business strategies. Our approach ensures that your growth is based on taking full advantage of your particular organization's dynamics. Only by effectively aligning your product development, business strategy and organization can you eliminate obstacles to growth and achieve superior performance.
In the rush to grow and increase profit, many companies fail to address the root causes that impede growth, often keeping their eye only on the end goal. As a result, business plans are developed with tactics that ultimately end up causing new development and delivery problems or result in relatively small achievements that run short of the growth objectives that are necessary.
Another important and often overlooked element to implementing a business strategy is understanding how to leverage organizational dynamics - value systems, behaviors and culture - to ensure that your organization can mobilize around activities and that outcomes are predictable.
At TeraFact, we help you assess internal and external conditions and identify obstacles that impede growth. Using this knowledge, we develop appropriate plans and activities to optimize the usage of scarce product development funds. The benefits to you are predictable product development initiatives aligned to your Strategic Business Development goals.
TeraFact goes beyond simply making recommendations. As your partner, our consultants steer your development organization through innovations by coaching, teaching and literally guiding your team through real projects so that changes are implemented effectively to improve permanently how you do business.
Assessment of Offering
What's getting in the way of your success? Is it time-to-market? Market share? Cost overruns? An ineffective product road map? Lack of group consensus? Or maybe you're not quite clear just what the problem is.
Many companies think they know what their problems are only to later learn that the issue is merely a symptom and the problem lies deeper. We help you get to the core of the problem.
Identifying improvements that will yield exponential payback is what our assessment approach is all about.
Existing Products
In order to fully understand the issues and how they affect your strategy and bottom line of existing products being offered, we combine the product histories with a brief study of your operational supply chain, price matrix and marketing plan. During this assessment, we gather information on the mission and goals of your offering, the obstacles in achieving your offering goals, and the overall operating environment - adding another layer of data to understand what influences your product sell-through and to uncover potential improvement initiatives.
New Products
TeraFact will assist you in defining the market potential study, market scope, channel strategies, packaging viability and the merchandising and marketing of your product offering. We have found this to be the area that most companies overlook in the early stages and can significantly save money if these fundamentals are followed. Many factors make up the product offering matrix and many are pitfalls that only experience can help you overcome.
We combine all of the data and analysis gathered during these studies to develop working plans that detail the priorities and outline how to move forward with the product launch to maximize success.
Launch Theory
Successful new products, whether they're tangible physical goods or intangible services, are your company's lifeblood. Why, then, do as many as 90% of new products fail within two years of introduction?
The most common reason is lack of research of the customer's needs and the proper merchandising of products even if they are properly targeted for the customer.
Most companies approach to the product development process can help create either winning products that hit the target with customers and make money, or offer products that provide no value to customers and contribute nothing to profitability. Whether you end up with a product that delights customers or is a dud depends on how successfully you address your product development and packaging design procedures.
We find most customers fail on the front end of the design and development of the products as well as the package and market acceptance of their offering. The first area we address is the “Owner Theory.” This is common when a product is designed or conceived by the “owner/inventor” where they have such an emotional attachment to a product or service making it hard to look at the project objectively.
The second problem that faces companies trying to launch a product is the internal politics of “Who gets Credit.” We have found this to be the most devastating of any issue facing companies trying to bring a product to market. TeraFact can assist most companies in creating a team with clearly defined objectives in order to optimize the design and subsequent time-to-market.
Both of the aforementioned challenges can be overcome with a clear understanding of the product objectives and profitability expectations.
Software Development Products
There's more pressure than ever for today's software developers (and companies) to get their products to market first. We've worked with brand-name companies to implement flexible approaches designed specifically for the special concerns of software developers.
“First-to-market" is the mantra of today's software providers. It places enormous strain on the quality of the software. In many instances the need to balance the creativity of software development with hard-nosed business realities is the key to market acceptance. We help companies implement processes that address the special needs of developing software in today's market.
As software developers who are also experts in product development, we've been there. We know how it works and how it should work. We know that the structured processes often found in hardware or tangible product-oriented companies may not be the right process fit for your company. We know how to leverage best-in-class product development practices for software development teams.
Instead of applying rigid processes, we work with you to assess what works best in your organization and the unique, creative minds of software engineers and developers. We analyze your past successes and find ways to fine-tune your software development processes. We work with your software development team, providing them with deeper insight into customer and market needs and developing "best practices" that suit their way of coding while still allowing for tight schedules.
Applying our collaborative approach, we:
- Assess your current practices and determine ways to strengthen them;
- Work with your software development team and approach the process from their perspective;
- Involve your software development team in learning about customer needs firsthand, then allowing them to create market-leading solutions instead of merely following an often-prescribed features requirement set;
- Provide best-in-class practices on software scheduling and testing, team consensus and other elements of the process.
What's right for one software development project isn't necessarily right for the next, so we don't apply a "cookie cutter" approach. We use a process that works for the special needs of your software objective.
Supply Chain Management
You can improve your competitive edge by integrating suppliers for designing products, for developing products and for manufacturing and supplying them. It is our collaborative thinking that sets us apart
The effective management of the supply chain is a huge competitive factor for many companies. We've found that the way in which products are delivered can make a profound difference. In addition, our technical abilities will assist in the efficiencies of managing your supply chain integration.
Supplier Integration requires planning up front, applying creative thinking and critical analysis to make/buy decisions and linking your supply chain strategies to product design and development. Effective Supplier Integration Strategies give you the insight to know that even though you may be using a more expensive power supply - one that costs 20% more - this component selection can save a lot of money in areas like inventory control, shipping cost and defective inventory rates.
We have a step-by-step prescriptive approach to help you improve your supplier management and to build a supplier management organization.
Our analysis of "best practices" has shown that 95% of the time problems in the supply chain are product design problems. We help you:
- Assess your current supply chain and determine how it affects your bottom line;
- Develop an improved supply chain strategy;
- Define roles, responsibilities and rules of engagement.
- We also help you implement effective supply chain strategies that incorporate supply chain considerations during the product design and development process, including:
- Exploring opportunities for postponement manufacturing, designing for outsourcing and design for testability;
- Developing methods for working with suppliers including structuring the relationship and contract;
- Working with your R&D department, product developers and materials department to redesign and implement design for supply chain mentality by incorporating best-in-class fundamentals.
Supplier Integration. It just might provide the competitive edge you're looking for.
