Confectionery

International New Product Portfolio Management

Background

International confectionery giant successfully diversifying away from traditional base to take advantage of rise in demand for health food snacks, sugar free gum and luxury chocolate.

The Challenge

The company is still highly decentralised; founded on highly autonomous, geographically spread business units. Each one catering to local preferences in flavour, packaging and point of sale display.

Continued growth has led to a huge volume of new product development projects. These are managed at both a global and local level with little coordination. There was a need for an international rationalisation of the whole portfolio with a coordinated approach delivering fewer, better new products much more efficiently.

Results

With our help this client developed a set of best practice guidelines for global portfolio management and created powerful communication and training tools to help regional product managers to improve the commercial success of the portfolio at a local level. These tools also provided a mechanism to roll-up and review the portfolio at regional and global levels to support the overall optimisation of the portfolio of brands.