Consumer Goods: Navigate Choppy Waters and Manage Chaos

Written by Brooke Boeser | May 4, 2018

Leaders in Consumer Goods, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), and Food and Beverage (F&B) are actively confronting choppy waters on a daily basis caused by:

Volatile changes in consumer demands

Unpredictable markets

Global digitization

Small-company disruptors

Declining growth and revenue

Leadership teams in established enterprises often struggle to navigate these challenges and steer their organization with speed and agility in the right direction.

Set your sails towards calmer waters by improving the efficiency of innovation, R&D and new product development (NPD) processes, cross-functional collaboration, and visibility into portfolio investments. This will help align investments with strategic goals to ultimately empower smart, fast decision making.

You Can't Control the Winds, but You Can Control Your Sails

Every organization faces unique challenges. However, there are collective threads we've seen time and time again when working with our clients. The table below illustrates common issues consumer goods organizations face, how Sopheon's Accolade ^® software helps enterprises solve them, and the resulting value brought to the organization.

Problem

Topline and margin growth are lagging due to shifts in consumer preferences.

Solution

Ensure that short- and long-term product development activities are aligned with strategic priorities and financial targets. Generate insightful “what-if” scenarios to strengthen the product planning process and then concentrate funding and resource allocations on the projects with the greatest commercial potential.

Result

Increase success rate

Increase portfolio value

Increase value via smarter decisions

Problem

Absence of global process standards makes it difficult to repeat and leverage success from other teams and projects. While some elements of standardized process may exist, the inconsistency and overall lack of process creates growth barriers.

Solution

The highly configurable system allows global standards with localized flexibility. Multiple process models map risk to rigor, bringing needed visibility and enabling repeatable success.

Result

Reduce wasted efforts and inefficiencies

Increase value via smarter decisions

Problem

Small start-ups with agile capabilities are winning market share from established leaders. Large organizations can be sluggish to learn and react to change, resulting in delivering the wrong products that waste time and money or "slow to market" projects that miss critical profit windows.

Solution

Enterprises are transforming themselves from the inside out to boost agile capabilities, often resulting in organizational change to the operating model, programs and portfolios. Accolade automates the management of complex relationships and connections between business units, portfolio structures, data sources and metrics. Quickly restructure your entire data model system to mirror operational changes, increasing your ability to meet new business needs. Innovation and NPD process governance simplifies cross-functional planning, bringing clarity to trade-offs and outcomes. This increased visibility further boosts agile capabilities, aiding in quick, ongoing responses to changes in the market.

Result

Improve time to market

Improve efficiency

Increase value via smarter decisions

Problem

A lack of executive visibility to portfolio segmentation stops leadership from seeing where there are gaps in investments and strategy/corporate direction. For instance, executives can't compare brands, business units and types of investments to see if they align with innovation strategy.

Solution

Best-practice executive dashboards effectively visualize where there are gaps and drive clear decision-making.

Result

Reduce wasted efforts and inefficiencies

Increase value via smarter decisions

By adopting digitally-driven techniques and platforms like Accolade, you can improve the outcomes of your innovation and NPD process and significantly impact both top-line growth and bottom-line profit.

Manage Chaos

Leading companies need leading software platforms.

Just last year, Sopheon was named to Consumer Goods Technology Readers' Choice List for the ninth straight year. Thank you to our customers who voted for us! Read our press release to learn more about this exciting news.

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It's impossible to turn a ship on a dime, but it is possible to turn around outdated innovation processes. See our illustration of what needs to be done to successfully move to a digitalized product innovation process and maintain a competitive edge in the consumer goods, CPG, and F&B industries.

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Chart your own course and sail through your innovation process with greater speed, agility and visibility. Watch “The Full Benefits of Digital New Product Processes” presented by Conagra's Theresa Manahan and Sopheon's Brad Eby to dive into a Conagra/Accolade use case.

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If you feel like your gated processes could use a refresh, make sure to stop by our Beyond Stage-Gate ^® resource hub, where you'll find articles, on-demand webinars and more on updating the way your teams innovate together.

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If you've gotten this far, you're probably looking to change for the better and improve how your enterprise manages chaos. Contact us and we'll connect you with one of our Consumer Goods experts in process, portfolio and innovation management.

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