The speaker used the car industry as an example. In the 1980s, the three big US manufacturers - GM, Ford and Chrysler - took 5 years to design and produce a new car. By the early 1990s, this had declined to 4 years and by the mid-1990s, the target was a cycle time of 3 years. However, the US companies had been left behind by Japanese companies who by this time had reduced development time to 2 years. In 2002, the Wall Street Journal quoted the CEO of Honda as saying that his company needed to reduce development times to 18 months. The seminar speaker made the obvious point that such reductions in the major process of new product development also needed the equivalent reductions in the sub-processes that support it - including procurement. You considered these comments and came to two conclusions. First, there were the same pressures to speed up new product development in the food products industry as in the motor industry. These pressures probably arrived later, but they were no less intense, and the life cycles of Simon and Singh's products were continually getting shorter. In some ways, the pressures were even more pressing, as the