Product Development is a creation process

Research and development at Caterpillar is the means by which we identify, create and perfect the technologies and solutions that help our customers be successful. Research and development is powered by the Caterpillar engineering community of more than 8,000 highly skilled technical experts around the world.

Product creation can be broken into steps:

• Strategy definition, in which we define product and technology plans, leverage the strengths of our deeply integrated enterprise, and ensure products and technologies are tailored for each customer segment.
• Product development, in which we define how the extended enterprise works together to develop products and technology more efficiently and effectively than our competition, and create the recipe to be executed by our production system.
• Manufacturing execution, in which we ensure that the recipe created by product development is prepared and executed consistently and efficiently.
• Product support, in which we sustain the value of our customers' investment.

While these basic steps have been constant since the advent of modern research and development, the processes we use to execute them have changed significantly. Caterpillar has forged bold improvements in the use of virtual tools, predictive analysis, and quality and manufacturing systems, and is using them to design better, more cost effective products to provide our customers with competitive advantage.