Innovation & NPD Process Transformation

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Overview

New Product Development (NPD)  is the critical business process that continuously delivers the innovations required to delight your customers and grow your profitability.

From market or customer insight, to product launch and beyond, getting the NPD process right is essential for business survival, growth and efficiency. Getting it wrong can lead to lost sales and market share, excessive costs throughout the supply chain and exposure to significant commercial and operational risk.

At Pico, we are passionate about helping our clients to design and implement NPD Stage-Gate processes that are lean, powerful, flexible and appropriate for your business and environment. The result is a collaborative and accountable innovation culture that can effectively work across buiness functions and geographies to deliver a regular pipeline of profitable innovations.

"By the end of the project, the whole team really appreciated the approach and felt that it added so much value to our NPD process. It also enabled strong cross-functional working and ensured that we were tackling key work stream items at the appropriate time"

  • Arlene Rebello, Global Sales, Afton Chemical

The issues we can help you solve

While there will always be unique features of your particular business and competitive environment, we find that the issues which typically plague organisations are almost always similar, if not the same. These issues include:

  • Ineffective practices for gathering customer or market requirements
  • Weak communication across functional departments
  • Poor management of technical and commercial risk
  • Ineffective project planning
  • Weak accountability
  • Failing to embed Design for Manufacture (DFM) thinking into the early stages of your development process.

"Pico was always on hand for advice and support, easy to work with and most importantly, helped us to regain credibility with the customer"

How we work with you

By partnering with us, we can ensure that you develop and implement a powerful yet workable process that incorporates the very best practice from the world's leading product innovators. We've worked with a large number of clients in Chemicals, FMCG, Food & Beverage, Packaging and Heavy Equipment to name just a few.

We scope each project according to your specific situation and goals. While each project is different, the following phases are typical:

  1. Review of current state- During this phase, we conduct a through assessment of your current workflow, governance and culture with respect to New Product Development. This could include interviews and group discussions, often focusing on a recent project that has exhibited some of the issues that need to be addressed.
  2. Process Design- During this phase, we will facilitate a number of design sessions with key stakeholders from across the business functions including commercial, technical, financial, legal, operations, quality and health & safety. The team will be introduced to best practice principles and tools and invited to develop an innovation workflow that can practically work in your environment.
  3. Pilot & Enhance - In this phase, we will pilot the new approach on a live commercial project. The project team will be coached to apply the new process, while feedback and learning is captured and fed back to the design team. Project Gatekeepers will also be coached to better support the new process. As the project progresses, the process will be further modified and improved.
  4. Change Readiness - In this phase, we will prepare to launch the new process. Typical activities will include aligning IT systems to the new process, developing training and communication materials, addressing barriers to change and developing internal coaches to support the roll out.
  5. Transform - In this phase, we will launch the change programme. Communication and training activities will take place, new expectations will be set and improvements to  reporting and governance processes will be made. Key metrics will also be established to continuously measure the improvement in NPD project performance. Finally, your internal coaches & change agents will be supported to continuously own, manage and improve the process before handover and closeout.

Transforming People & Performance

The typical benefits from transforming your New Product Developement (NPD) Stage-Gate process include:

  • New products that consistently meet or exceed your customers expectations, while achieving the targeted profit margin
  • Shorter product development lead times that give you a valuable edge over your competition
  • Fewer issues during scale-up and launch
  • Less technical and commerical risk
  • Less waste throughout the supply chain, with products that are developed with manufacturability and economies of scale in mind from the earliest stages.
  • An empowered and capable workforce supported by a lean and powerful process that enables them to consistently get work done, deliver value for the customer and drive out waste.

Ready to find out more?

We'd love to discuss your individual situation and help you to determine whether NPD process transformation is the right solution for you. Why not get in touch?

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