A global, direct-to-consumer products industry leader in nutritionals and personal care was looking to transform its product development lifecycle and significantly reduce the time to develop and commercialize new products. The client engaged Clarkston product lifecycle management (PLM) experts to conduct an end-to-end assessment of the product development processes, strategy, organization, and technology to develop a clear path to significantly improve speed to market.   

Founded on science, quality, and a mission of helping people live healthy, more rewarding lives, the client has become an international industry leader in health and wellness. Over time, the client’s pace of new product innovation and time to market has significantly slowed, resulting in missed market opportunities to serve their customers and adversely impacting their financial performance trajectory. Clarkston was enlisted to analyze the current state against leading best practice, develop a robust set of prioritized recommendations, establish clear implementation roadmaps, and analyze significant change impacts. 

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The project commenced by conducting more than 50 stakeholder interviews, reviewing process data and documentation, and conducting hands-on process and system reviews to gain an understanding of the current-state strengths and pain points.  Subsequently, the team carefully analyzed discovery data and identified 35 key challenge themes that were impeding the success and speed of product development. Leadership workshops were also conducted to confirm current-state challenges and align on the future-state vision and guiding principles for product development.   

Clarkston leveraged industry expertise and best practice insights to identify ~70 actionable recommendations, which were prioritized and sized based on business value and implementation effort. These recommendations were aligned to eight workstreams with 23 unique initiatives and 17 quick wins that were sequenced into an implementation roadmap and timeline.  Clarkston provided a change impact analysis to ensure leadership’s understanding of key change management efforts required for successful transformation.

In addition to the overall assessment, Clarkston conducted process optimization sessions to address specific product development process changes to improve efficiency and effectiveness. As a result, future-state processes were designed for five key processes areas resulting in 50-70%+ improvement in cycle time. To learn more about PLM process optimization best practices, connect with one of our PLM experts today. 

Download the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Case Study here. Learn more about our New Product Commercialization Services by contacting us below. 

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Contributions from Shane Partington