Integrated Project and Product Management process

Creating and updating product data during development can be challenging, as it often resides in a variety of disconnected stage documents, spreadsheets and home-grown databases.

With integrated product data, project teams can improve product differentiation, customer value and time-to-market. Gatekeepers make better gate decisions, and executives monitor product success metrics to improve overall innovation performance.

Our Products module streamlines all product-related information throughout the project development lifecycle. Capture requirements and propose product definitions, specifications and alternate configurations. Test business case assumptions for each configuration, and track compliance with requirements. Transfer product data to ERP systems ready for launch, and monitor post-launch metrics. Reuse standard items in our product library to define new products quickly and consistently.

The module can be deployed standalone, or integrated with our stage & gate projects and strategic planning modules.

Problems Solved

What requirements should this project satisfy?
What product variants will this project launch?
What is the definition & specifications of each product?
How will each product variant make money?
How will each product variant be configured?
What are the best alternate variants to launch?
Did each product variant meet its requirements claims?
How successful have our product launches been?

Our Products module is powered by Planisware software.

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Product Management - Key features

Requirements

Capture requirements from voice-of-customer, market, technical & operational analysis.

High-quality products are born from identifying high-quality requirements. But teams often struggle to do this, using a variety of documents, emails, presentations & spreadsheets.

Our software enables project teams to capture and organize requirements in a single register. Prioritize requirements using objective criteria, agree scope with stakeholders and track requirements changes throughout development.

Capture all types of requirements for the product in a single system.
Organize requirements into a hierarchy showing sub-requirements.
Prioritize requirements by commercial value and technical feasibility.
Attach supporting evidence to help explain requirements.
Agree prioritized requirements with project stakeholders.

Definition

Identify product variants to be launched, track specifications and agree integrated product definitions.

Very often a product launch may include several product variants, versions, formulations or alternate configurations. These should all be developed within the same stage-gated project, rather than having to create a separate project for each.

Our software enables a project team to define multiple product variants within the same project. Identify variants for different customer segments, define specifications and integrated product definitions for each.

Identify product variants to be developed by the project.
Categorize variants by target segment, region, product line etc.
Develop an integrated product definition for each product.
Define and control specifications for each product.

Configurations

Define product formulations & configurations, build proposed Bill of Materials.

Project teams often need to define detailed product formulations or configurations. These are used to predict cost and functionality, test prototypes and prepare for production and supply chain.

Our software enables you to define a high-level product Bill of Materials using standard items from our product library. Estimate product unit cost from BoM quantities. Create alternate configurations to investigate specification and cost options. Reuse modules and technologies defined by other products to reduce cost and accelerate time to market.

Formulate product Bill of Materials.
Reuse standard components from the product library.
Calculate product unit cost from BoM.
Make trade-off decisions with different costs and features.
Communicate configuration options to project stakeholders.

Business Case

Forecast cost-benefit analysis of each product. Track revisions and test financial assumptions.

Product business cases answers the question ‘why are we investing in this project?’ Using spreadsheets to do this can be error prone and hard to control multiple versions.

Our software provides online business case templates, to model volume, price and unit cost assumptions over time for different product variants and distribution channels. Calculate product profitability, gross margin, EBIT, NPV and productivity index. Track and compare versions. Import actual product sales data to monitor actual product success rates and return on innovation investment.

Capture initial estimates of product volume, price and cost.
Automatically calculate revenue, gross margin, EBIT and NPV.
Compare business cases of alternate product definitions.
Test assumptions against competitive analysis and customer value.
Calculate post-launch product success metrics.
Bi-directional import and export to Microsoft Excel.

Compliance & Validation

Manage regulated items in products, validate test results against product requirements.

Product testing and validation can be a data intensive process. Managing this data online, rather than in spreadsheets, or ad-hoc databases, improves data consistency and streamlines the process.

Our software enables project teams to define product validation plans, identify regulated ingredients and schedule test facilities. Track test results, regulatory approvals and certifications. Compare test results to requirements and update marketing claims and specifications.

Review regulated ingredients & specifications.
Select standard tests for product validation.
Track test results.
Validate product requirements and claims are met.

Data Transfer

Automatically exchange product data with ERP systems prior to product launch.

Sharing data between your product development system and your ERP system has many benefits. But doing so manually is time consuming and error prone.

Our software automates this data integration. Transfer product specifications to ERP prior to product launch. Import actual product sales, volumes and costs from ERP to track product success. Synchronize common reference data between our Product Library and ERP. Our system data connectors are easy to configure and maintain and include a certified bi-directional SAP interface.

Capture proposed product data during development.
Automatically export product data to ERP prior to launch.
Automatically import actual sales, costs & volumes from ERP.
Automatically synchronize common reference data.
Standard data connectors are easy to configure and maintain.

Product Library

Maintain standard requirements & specifications libraries. Reuse to define new products.

Many businesses retain a valuable knowledge of standard requirements, specifications and technologies that new projects could benefit from. But it can be hard for to reuse this to accelerate product development, if the information is not readily available.

Our product library maintains a master set of standard requirements, technologies, regulated ingredients, trials and suppliers. Quickly search the library to reuse items in new projects. View the entire portfolio of current and previous product launches to analyze product results and key performance metrics.

Reuse standard requirements for different product types.
Reuse modules and technologies in new configurations.
Maintain master list of raw materials and regulated ingredients.
Specify standard test protocols to validate product claims.
Monitor products from all projects in a single view.

Reporting

Monitor dashboards of new product performance, to improve innovation capabilities.

Top innovators rigorously use metrics to assess innovation results and guide the right actions to improve innovation capabilities. If you don’t have a target, you will always miss!

Our software includes product dashboards and standard metrics to evaluate new product performance. Drill down by product line, business unit, innovation newness, customer segment and geographic region. Visualize with pie charts, bubble charts, trend lines and bar charts. Rollup across multiple product portfolios.

Product business case variance.
Time-to-market and launch variance.
Vitality Index: % of revenue from new products.
Productivity Index: ratio of product revenue to development cost.
New product portfolio balance & return on investment.

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