Food & Drink

Fact Based Decision Making

Background

• Undermining of established brands by “Own Label” products.
• Extremely short product life-cycles requiring constant innovation.
• Increasingly tight margins demanding a continuous focus on the NPD Business Case.
• Strong seasonality increasing pressure on development resources.
• Complexity of managing multiple projects running concurrently.

The Challenge

• To reverse the trend of margin erosion.
• To prioritise resources to ensure improved category management.
• To improve the coordination of the efforts of large numbers of staff working on multiple projects.
• To identify how the “partnership” with the major retailers can be improved without sacrificing profit.

Results

By introducing simple, but effective, phase gate controls we were able to ensure timely “fact based” decisions are made for all projects.  These are facilitated by using an improved business case model that provides a fuller picture of a projects’ value. 
Projects that do not fit with the Category plans or meet financial thresholds are stopped before any customer commitments are made, leading to an immediate improvement in forecast margins.
The comprehensive nature of the gates has also improved the cross functional synchronisation and thereby reduced development times.