The packaging industry is getting more and more complex and so go the development of innovative product solutions. To stay on the fast track you need to deliver faster than your competitors, you need to be easy to work with and even more in a fast moving environment. Add to this a clear ambition to double sales growth and to increase margin and there’s a need to enable the organization with an efficient framework to better value the pipeline of new opportunities, simplify the ways of working, foster easier collaboration and in turn gain competitiveness.
Enhance Innovation Project Portfolio Management practices to accelerate decision making process and secure commitments to clients
Building upon the corporate Stage & Gate foundations, we helped a global manufacturer of consumer dispensing packaging to set up a common set of methods and tools to bring project portfolio management practices to the best practices of the industry.
Customers expect their suppliers to be right at the first time. By better linking technical scope progress, deadlines, costs and resources needed, the project manager better analyzes the impacts of a shift, anticipate the deviation from the targets and better coordinate with the contributing teams.
With a more reliable and less time-consuming consolidation of the projects’ forecasts at portfolio level, the business managers are better equipped to monitor the execution of their strategic plan, prioritize projects and release budget.
Above all, it is a bright new project management mindset that is expected to come along with it: a mindset which has been growing positively since the last three years but that now must rise to the level of the best professional standards of the market in order to allow Aptar to make a step ahead and stay above the competition.
Focus on a scope that will leverage the bigger business impact
Priority was given first to new product development projects. In most industries the development represent approximately 20% of the product total cost. But 80% of the decisions that are made at that stage will have impact on later product quality and margin and ultimately on the contribution to sales.
Also the business segments and regions consolidating a significant contribution to the company’s turnover were considered as the pionniers.
Hack the legacy, experiment and scale a minimum viable product
This global manufacturer is operating worldwide, in various businesses (Beauty, Home care, Pharmaceutical, Food and Beverage…) each facing their own challenges. It’s not hard to imagine the difficulties encountered in trying to harmonize ways of working. At the same time some local initiatives had proven strong benefits on which we can capitalize but without trying to apply the model of one business to all the other . It was all about going one step further! But how?
Breaking from the conventional V-cycle and pushing agility beyond its limits, we decided to use the methods of the fast growing start-ups to converge on a common set of robust business rules and digitalize project portfolio management through a an enterprise wide solution (Planisware). We transformed a community of PM Champions into a team of Hackers to crack a solution that could work effectively and bring positive business impacts in less than 6 months.
Within that period of time the teams managed to secure the next quarterly forecast of the Innovation portfolio, connect project execution to cost controlling and revenue recognition, as well as initiate a first level of resource management. All the experimentations are made on real data in order to stay as close as possible to the business reality, and accelerate the ramp-up.
It is also supported by a viral communication and change management campaign to promote the initiative reaching a worldwide audience, federating a community and progressively engaging people.