Leading Specialty Chemicals Company Strives to Improve New Product Development
This client is a world-leading developer, manufacturer and marketer of specialty and custom chemicals, maximizing growth opportunities and minimizing risk in new product development opportunities.
The Challenge
Streamline new product development making use of more effective management communication, decision-making models, cross-functional teams and supported by rapid response technology apps and time management tools. Support knowledge holders, creatives and project managers to be successful and keep the process relevant to business needs.
Facts
- Company has history of success in new product development.
- Existing tools, approaches and procedures are legacy, out of date, or irrelevant.
- Innovation is a core driver of company profitability
Project Scope
There were two core needs here. First, enabling the company to rediscover and re-engage its established culture of innovative product development and second, to provide new tools and processes that would enable them to do it competitively (and also help inspire confidence). We sent a highly seasoned innovation team with the multi-functional expertise and insight in chemical industry new product development to observe and then build and facilitate with client a culturally relevant solution.
Added Value
The solution was built on simultaneously addressing and integrating three approaches:
- Engage the client through a structured team approach with executive oversight
- Develop a framework for assessing the lifecycle of product development projects
- Create a decision making mechanism for project investments
Results
The approach was designed to remove as many obstacles from the former approaches as possible so that teams could work at the speed of inspiration, avoid getting bogged in process dead ends. Project managers had the focus and the tools to manage complex projects, while executives could drive and motivate employees to engage and complete them.
Project Wins
“Innovation demands a great deal of hard work. What is key to the success of any new product development and innovation effort is creating confidence in the employees, the experts, managers, and executives that participate, that the process will be successful. Our focus here was to create a structure that reflected the input and experience of everyone and helped the company to continue its tradition as an Innovative leader.”
-Haig Armaghanian, CEO Haig Barrett