Delivering 70% Reduction in Time-to-Market for New Product Introduction

WRITTEN BY

Developing and launching a new product (NPDI or New Product Development and Introduction Process) has been an area of both opportunity and weakness for companies in the Consumer Packed Goods or CPG sector. New successful products often translate into millions of dollars in sales but a long launch period or delay could mean heavy losses due to missed opportunity cost and potential loss of market share.

Hence, the velocity of NPD (New Product Development) is highly critical and directly impacts the top line of the organization

The Challenge

NPD is a heavily customized process and very specific to organizational or industry needs. This process traverses across multiple departments and roles. It touches many people in the ecosystem – a few hundred across various countries in case of large organizations, extending to external vendors and suppliers. Typical divisions that come into play in the process are R&D, Marketing, Supply chain, Finance, Brand management, and Master data. It is in this context that the need for an enhanced collaborative and integrated Smart App becomes more pronounced.

Tools like Product Lifecycle Management Systems, Supply Chain Systems, ERPs or other enterprise systems have been in existence for a while to address these challenges. However, many of them fail to cover the end-to-end lifecycle of new product development.

The Solution

Smart Apps built on top of a platform such as Process Orchestration from SAP comes to the rescue. These apps improve the speed of the process by bringing together various people and system components as well as through increased automation and integration. A new technology implementation or development of a new app is also an opportunity to streamline and optimize the ‘as-is’ process. As technology alone is not a silver bullet in the run in the faster product introduction lifecycle

Incture Technologies created an NPI Smart App for one of our large CPG customers with a presence in 100+ countries. Through our solution, they managed to reduce the number of steps involved from 300 to 142 and brought down the NDPI cycle from 6 months to 2 weeks.

Our solution aggregated multiple process steps into one platform, eliminated non-value-adding human touchpoints in the system and converged UIs across systems into a single user interface. This created a common layer of operations that shielded users from differences and changes in the underlying systems. For the user, this meant a common User Interface (UI) that created a highly simplified User Experience (Ux). This resulted in an overall reduction of 70% in the think time i.e. time spent on the application screen.

It is vital to collaborate with complex processes, especially in a large organization where product data is spread across divisions and multiple people donning multiple roles.

Our solution gives your company the advantage through a combination of an intelligent user interface, increased collaboration, automated substitution, workload-based routing, and improved visibility.

To know more, just drop a mail to marketing@incture.com.