Machinery industry is the mother of industry and the machine tool is the necessary equipment in the manufacturing process in many industries. In a highly competitive and global surroundings today, facing of the changes in the environment in the industry is inevitable, especially in the time since Taiwan was admitted into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Constantly new products development requires new equipments in the production. In other words, the machinery industry needs to put more effort in developing new machine tools and make it into the market as soon as possible.
Therefore, one of the major issues is to evaluate and select the optimal time-to-market of the new product development in this industry. This study presents a framework that effectively considers the issues of evaluation and investigates the major influential factors in every developing stage. After the determination and identification of these factors, the importance and interaction among major influential factors are analyzed by the AHP and ANP method.
Thirteen system factors are considered in this single research by the literature review and interview with experts who have the experiences of new products development more than ten years in the machinery industry. The study has concluded that the four groups affecting the time-to-market in machinery industry, including development-processes, organization-mechanisms, strategic-capabilities and controls. The importance weights of each individual group and system factors at each group could be calculated by AHP or ANP. This is an empirical study about using ANP approach to analyze the time-to-market in machinery industry.
The empirical results were used to validate the feasibility of the procedure proposed in this study. This procedure identified the same experts in the empirical case. ANP approach provides a reasonable tool to help managers make appropriate decisions in the management of time-to-market of new product. To further examine the characteristics of products, all products are divided into three groups: the fast-mover group, the follower group, and the late-entrant group. Each group is comprised of the choice in the evaluation of each expert. The group differentials can represent the heterogeneity of products on influencing factors. Managers should place an emphasis on the criteria with both high importance and high heterogeneity. The most investment-worthy factors should be financial and organizational controls, which have the largest importance weights as well as rather large group differentials. Therefore, managers should put more effort into increasing their scores on these two factors. The analysis based on the group differentials on individual factors reveals some useful messages to managers who are responsible for product development.

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