Digital transformation has brought FMCG / CPG customers closer to R&D. The insights are flowing in fast and furious. How can companies keep up by releasing products faster?
With strong, project-based collaboration being essential enterprises have used whatever tools they could find. We’ve found enterprises using everything from product lifecycle management to project management tools to excel sheets to a combination of these to develop products faster. And yet many enterprises struggle to optimize product development.
Some of the common challenges we’ve seen are:
- Unpredictable timelines
- Mismatch between the revenue potential of a product and it’s prioritization during development
- Slow escalation of issues
- Delays in approvals
- Small errors resulting in large re-work costs
With finance, marketing, production, distribution, vendor management and more contributing a certain amount of confusion is par for the course. Or is it?
With product development so critical to FMCG / CPG companies most if not all companies have mapped out the steps that a new product goes through in going from an idea or concept to an SKU ready for distribution. The challenge lies in the fact that these workflows are owned, designed and customized on an ongoing basis and in silos. There is a vast amount of knowledge about products, distributors, pricing data and more that lies in documents in this or that manager’s inbox or in this or that director’s head. These leaders are then responsible for informing and educating contributors to their projects. Project management professionals make the most of what they can gather of past data and the collective expertise of their teams to forecast, then run around gathering progress. In the meantime, individual contributors need to be trained and educated on processes to be followed, often abandoned when deadlines loom. Project leaders are usually more than capable of taking great decisions on the go. But great decisions need good information on progress which is often at a premium.
The result? Avoidable mistakes and delays that eat into revenue and profits. It is hard enough to get your product mix right and then beat the competition without having to beat yourself. What also gets lost in all the talk about numbers is the stress teams and leaders deal with in launching new products.
Today a small investment in process mapping can go a very, very long way in driving revenue, profitability and quality of life.