Software for Innovation Excellence

Portfolio Management
One of the most dramatic ways of improving the return of your R&D investments is to do the "right projects". Portfolio management is the discipline of balancing all your product management resources and skills to achieve optimum strategic, financial and operational impact across all product lines in all life cycle phases.
This is done by choosing better and different innovation projects to invest in, moving away from low value and low strategically aligned projects toward higher value and better aligned ones. Portfolio Management is about better budget and resource allocations and helps answering to how your company can more effectively invest in R&D. By providing your managers with a strategic and operational vision over the company's R&D projects, it will helps them to improve their portfolio decision making and shorten product cycle times. 
Like for many other companies, Portfolio Management can become for you a real competitive advantage.

The IFT offering is the only software solution to provide in one single integrated solution "best in class" New Product Development practices and functionality: 
      1.  Portfolio and Idea Management
          n       At strategic level: alignment, product & technology roadmapping, financial planning, capacity planning 
          n      
At tactical level : idea & initiative mgmt, financial value, priorities, balance, budget & resource management
      2. Stage-Gate Process 
          n       Business Case, Evaluation and Scoring, Go/Hold/Kill, resource allocation, deliverable tracking 
          n       Repeatable, reliable, measurable, auditable 
     
3. Project Management 
          n       Execution: planning & scheduling, matrix resource management, cost control, risk & progress monitoring
  

Key Capabilities
IFT's solution provides key stakeholders of the Portfolio Management process with the following tools, all integrated in a single, user-friendly environment:
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Matrix charts: are used to analyze a portfolio according to different dimensions for comparison, prioritization and arbitrage purposes. These charts display each project according to two dimensions such as risk vs. rewards, technical newness vs. market newness, competitive strength vs. market attractiveness, etc. The size of the bubbles can represent an additional dimension such as forecasted cost of the project, while its color can indicate its current status (proposal, approved, etc…). Matrices allow decision makers to understand if the portfolio is well balanced and, for example, encourage new project candidates in areas where they are not in sufficient number or value. 

 



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Funnels charts: are used to analyze a portfolio according to its progress in the development process. As with Matrix charts, the size of the bubble and its color can be configured to give additional information. Funnels allow decision makers to measure how the overall NPD process is performing. Do we have enough ideas at the discovery stage? Are we killing enough of them along the way to allow the most performing ones to succeed? Do we have too many of them at the same stage which will prevent us from achieving any by lack of resources?

Scorecards: enable decision makers to compare projects according to multiple standardized criteria: financial indicators
like ROI or NPV, probability of success, strategic alignment, etc…. When a large number of criteria are used, the IFT solution allows them to be combined and weighted to provide a composite indicator to simplify analysis. Criteria values can be associated to stoplight colors to facilitate understanding. Scorecards can be built and saved to provide managers with standard as well as ad-hoc analysis.

 

 

Simulations: managing a portfolio includes anticipating future problems and reacting quickly to the unexpected: decreasing sales potential, new competitor entering the market, delay in project, cost increases, priority changes, etc. The IFT solution allows you to change any parameters of the project and of the portfolio, investigate as many scenarios as needed and compare the different simulation results at any point in time.

Efficient frontier: our system's algorithmic will automatically select projects and calculate a graph showing the maximum return for any given level of investment, based on the available projects in the portfolio.
This graph is known as the "efficient frontier" and is very useful to see the additional return that can be achived for an increase in investment level. The software enables you to select the measurement of investment return, such as NPV, sales revenue or gross margin, as well as the measurement for the investment level, for example 2000 R&D budget, 2008-2012 cpapital costs , or resource headcounts.

 

 

Roadmaps: are used to better understand and
manage the interactions between business strategy, product plans, tecnologies and technical platforms. One of the objective is optimizing the use of the resources and platforms while minimizing time to market.
IFT's solution offers a centralized collaboration place for roadmap information, easily accessible by the different stakeholders.
Interdependencies can be created between projects from the same or different product lines, between projects and platforms, etc.
Any number of simulations can be performed to simulate for example a delay in the availability of a given project or platform, or to investigate different scenarios to better address the market needs.
Finally the solution presents a very flexible representation of the roadmaps (colors, bars, milestones and legend) to facilitate analysis and clear communication to internal teams, partners and customers.

Financial planning and management: putting your R&D investments under strategic and financial control involves implementing specific financial process which ERPs cannot easily support without heavy customizations. The IFT solution provides ready-to-use and powerful features in this areas like:
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n      top-down and bottom-up synchronization of the R&D department budgeting process
n      support of multiple funding entities for any project or product line
n       rolling wave budget and revenue planning
n       cost estimating on user configurable lines
n       revenue & savings forecasting, development of P&L
n       internal and external project billing
n       15 hierarchical structures for consolidation and reporting
n       multiple resource rates, multi currencies
n       interfaces with financial modules of main ERPs

 

 

Dashboards: combine multiple key performance indicators to offer a complete vision of the portfolios health: bubble diagrams, scorecards, funnels, financial curves, resource histograms, multi-dimensional radars, planning barcharts, threshold reports, etc.
Standards dashboard can be easily defined, automatically generated and provided to the different management layers, taking into account their scope of responsibilities.