The customer is a global materials manufacturer with seventeen manufacturing sites and four research and development centers.

Situation

Each of the customer’s R&D centers ran its own product development structure to support regional product launches.  There was little collaboration or visibility across the centers.  In addition to the geographic challenges, the customer’s process suffered from unstructured and disconnected idea submission, had inconsistent scoring and idea progression, and lacked the ability to provide business intelligence, such as portfolio evaluation, across the ideation pipeline.  The customer wanted to create a global innovation process to utilize and pool together the best resources, supported by a solid ideation process and decision making tool, while managing regional launch variations. 

Solution

DataLan configured and deployed a global SharePoint infrastructure and implemented InnovaOPN on it, opening the company’s ideation process to more workers, while simultaneously streamlining and structuring the ideation process.  Idea submission and review was standardized, allowing people’s ideas to be captured and given appropriate review.  Ideas passing the review entered a more rigorous stage gate process supported by collaboration spaces to track assignments by role, tasks, and artifacts that supported more effective idea elaboration.  Consistent gate criteria and effective portfolio views centered on idea strategic fit, market attractiveness, and technical feasibility, ensured that the organization’s resources were being spent in the development of the ideas with the highest potential.

Benefits