Tips for Driving More Value with Innovation

The consumer experience is at the very heart of product development. But the success of new product launch really boils down to how much value you can create for consumers and how fast you can do it. On April 26, 2012, during a CGT web seminar, experts from Tech-Clarity and Enginuity revealed best practices for consumer goods companies looking to:

 

    --Accelerate formula development

    --Reduce cost of good sold

    --Increase the value of the experience delivered to consumers

    --Accelerate scale up and product launch

    --Manage the multi-national complexities of the regulatory environment

 

Today’s consumer packaged goods companies face extreme demands on innovation and market responsiveness, but they must also navigate a tangled web of product compliance mandates in order to protect profitability. Tech-Clarity Inc. President Jim Brown drew from experience to reveal how companies can develop highly innovative products in shorter time through the use of best practices and PLM technology. “Innovation comes in different forms, it really applies to the entire product – from ingredients to packaging to labels and also the production process. We want to see people driving compliance, first time on a global basis… but we need to do it in a way where we’re not putting too big of a burden on our innovators,” Brown explained. He also discussed how CPG companies can innovate effectively and efficiently without overburdening critical resources with multi-national regulatory challenges and how today's enterprise systems can help.

 

Dr. John Sottery, vice president, Formulation Solutions, and founder, Enginuity, also presented a highly-compelling model of value creation by formula-based companies -- and introduced the concept of the "Innovation Vector", the critical factor that drives both the success and stock price of each company. “What the technology allows you to do is to let everyone collaborate. Each person has the right to change the part that they own, and everyone else has the right to see it, and then the system looks at how it all fits together and starts to flag conflict. To me, technology has allowed things to happen where before people wouldn’t take the risk,” Sottery said. He continued to provide an example using iPads. “When you give people an iPad, it doesn’t make them communicate, but it makes them a lot more likely to send e-mails and surf the Web and so on — you’re removing a barrier,” he closed.

 

To listen to this event in its entirety, click here.