Investigating the Effects of Customer Relationship Management and Supplier Relationship Management on New Product Development

Original scientific paper Most organizations today are increasingly influenced by competition and global markets due to advancements in information technology and economic globalization. Developments in information technology and increasing competitiveness are led to shorter product life cycles, increase rate of product obsolescence, growth of high-quality products and introduction of new products into the market. These factors have stimulated organizations to follow NPD goals such as reducing product development time, lower product cost with higher quality, shorter time-to-market, and improving delivery performance to achieve profitability and keep their market position. Customer and supplier involvement during the NPD processes has attracted widespread attention in the literature. SRM and CRM can improve the performance of New Product Development (NPD) as well as facilitate the role of customers and suppliers in NPD in the path towards a high-performance organization; therefore, it is necessary for organizations to gain a correct understanding of the roles of CRM and SRM in NPD processes and to draw on such a knowledge to enhance the performance of the new product. Given the advantages of applying CRM and SRM within organizations, this paper tries to explore the different roles of CRM and SRM which play in NPD process.