RECENT PROJECTS
The following are a couple of projects we recently completed
New Product Introduction
Background: Company A had an aggressive growth and new product introduction plan and was limited by the number of skilled resources and total investment dollars available to achieve it. Rather than increase investment or overdrive their people, they wanted to make a step-change improvement to the end-to-end process of bringing new products to market.
Our Services: Through a series of interviews, document reviews, and observations, we thoroughly examined the existing product development process from ideation through end-of-life. We then created a solution modeled after proven, best-in-class practices that were right for them and a transformation plan to get there.
The solution includes a defined Phase-Gate Process with a clear definition of roles and responsibilities, leverages existing systems and tools, such as ERP, JIRA©, and Confluence©, and a new product lifecycle management (PLM) tool to help manage the process and intellectual assets. With management's help, we redeployed some high-potential people into critical roles, trained them on their new responsibilities, and worked with them through the critical milestones, phases, and gate reviews of several projects.
Our Client's Success: Within 3-months, the team has 20% more new products under development, using the same resources. Product status meetings are crisp, clear and decisions are made quickly. Within 6-months, they expect to have launched over half of the initial products and have 50% more new products in the pipeline.
They are leveraging their internal and external resources more effectively and have dramatically decreased or eliminated missed schedules, scope creep, and false starts. The team is highly energized, ultra-collaborative and rapidly becoming a world-class new products group.
Footprint Consolidation
Background: Our client's sales revenue has grown by more than 20% a year for the last five years. With this growth came the need for more warehousing and order processing space. Over time, they leased nearby buildings within the industrial park for seven discrete structures.
As you might imagine, with a footprint spread out across seven buildings, the layout and workflows were far from optimized. There were significant inefficiencies in storage, material handling, and order processing.
Our Services: We worked with the client to understand their strategy, customer and operational requirements, growth estimates, and risks and opportunities, both quantitative and qualitative. We then modeled the criteria to determine the type and size of space required now and into the future. A search was then conducted to find a building that fit the requirements.
When a suitable building was found, we laid out the physical warehouse, receiving, storage, picking, and shipping areas and designed world-class workflows and operational processes that fit the business needs.
Our Client's Success: Within the first year, our client achieved over $1million in savings by reducing the total labor requirements and utility costs, eliminating overtime hours, offsite overflow storage, customer chargebacks, and damaged inventory. The working environment was greatly improved, and there were no lost time safety incidents.
Our client now has an operation, warehouse, and robust, reliable processes that will scale as they continue to grow.