European bakery group uses ServiceNow to drive New Product Development

Jochen Vos
Competence Lead SPM

Jochen has proven to be a goal-oriented and enterprising consultant with a strong analytic capability. With his experience he is able to advice customers about project portfolio management. He is able to give a clear understanding of his knowledge and insight, and achieves a high acceptance with his humor and persuasiveness. He has over a decade experience in advising clients how to organize project- portfolio management as well as hands-on experience as project manager, PMO-lead, change manager, engagement manager and trainer. As PPM knowledge lead Jochen is responsible to build upon the strong track record of Plat4mation on successful ITBM implementations with high customer satisfaction.

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Recently, a large European bakery group approached us with the question “How can you drive customer intimacy in combination with a more product–oriented approach to New Product Development (NPD)?” They were looking for faster and cheaper ways to deliver new products to their customers to become a more successful production company. We advised them to create a uniform and consistent NPD processes and lifecycle with ServiceNow PPM, including strategic alignment for every NPD initiative. This would then lead to consistent and real-time (consolidated) data to support informed decision–making across all stakeholders.

To fulfil demands, the bakery group needed a high level of customer intimacy. The challenge with customer intimacy is to ensure that it delivers long-term benefits for the organization.

This requires (re)use of your extensive catalogue of existing products to not only fulfil instant customer demands, but to partner with customers to discover their (future) needs. This is what will make you a trusted partner and not just a supplier.

New Product Development in ServiceNow

We advised the bakery group to start working with ServiceNow PPM to establish a consistent and uniform approach to each NPD initiative.

ServiceNow PPM contains all the bells and whistles to deliver NPD initiatives efficiently and effectively. From demands to capture/asses/approve initiatives to projects to deliver new products and programs, and portfolios to consolidate all initiatives required to successfully launch an NPD initiative, e.g. Marketing, production scaling, Logistics.

Capturing the actual product and its versions in ServiceNow helps the bakery group to leverage products delivered in the past, increasing their NPD efficiency and creating a stronger product approach towards NPD. Being able to discuss their customer’s needs and providing them with alternatives with more added value is what has made them a true partner.

In order to extract real value from the NPD process, the bakery group is now also able to align new product initiatives to business strategy—helping them to further strengthen their position in the market.

Implementation approach

Through workshops, we identified and captured the use cases that would add the most value. Thanks to our ServiceNow PPM expertise and knowledge of the NPD process, we were able to translate the workshop results and use cases into a ServiceNow configuration.

We then set out to implement the following combination of ServiceNow solutions, features and applications for the bakery group.

• ServiceNow OOTB PPM to manage the NPD initiatives lifecycle combined with platform features like reporting

• Workflows combined with a scoped application to manage the product catalogue including its relationship to initiatives and product versioning

Our walkthroughs resulted in a high commitment and adoption of the solution as well as ensuring employees from the bakery group felt comfortable working with the new solution. User adoption is essential to ensure a high data quality, as data quality directly influences decision-making.

Happy customer

Thanks to us, the bakery group…

• …was up and running in just 2 months
• …enjoys a quick and consistent process to capture new initiatives with proper feasibility and approval structures
• …now uses a gated approach to monitor and manage NPD, including production scaling and marketing
• …has workflows and reporting capabilities to support governance processes, including data consolidation and status reporting/progress
• …can easily keep all stakeholders informed about running initiatives, products delivered and contribution to business strategy

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