Bringing a product to market on time isn’t always plain sailing. It is a complex process involving multiple stakeholders and touchpoints with an array of variables.
“People involved in the countdown always say that the last twenty minutes are the worst. At that point all that is needed has been done, and therefore everyone has twenty minutes to think about what may not have been done, or otherwise what could go wrong. “
– Willy Ley –
Preparations for a space launch are standardised and follow one another in a predetermined order. It is marked by a countdown: each second represents the start of one phase and the end of another. We are used to thinking of the countdown as a numbering that starts from ten and reaches zero. In reality, for the Apollo missions, the counting began 6 days earlier, due to the complexity of the Saturn rocket.
Placing a new product on the food market is not so different from a launch from Cape Canaveral and is always a delicate time for a company. The risks are many and a Nielsen statistic (2014) confirms it: 76% of consumer goods launches risk failure within the first year. The causes can be numerous:
- The product does not fit the consumers’ requirements and aspirations
- The internal process does not support the correct business choices, allowing incompatible ideas to be filtered out early in the process
- The marketing and promotion of the product is off target
- The teams involved in product innovation are not working collaboratively
According to the same study, business that take the necessary steps to plan and follow agreed steps before, during and after the product launch, and collaborate at all stages of the NPD process, can overturn historic failures by 85%.
4Pack ‘s Product Lifecycle Management features allow you to eliminate repetitiveness, report on bottlenecks and optimize the processes themselves.
By reporting on the large amount of data points created, it is possible to know:
- Average time for product development
- Number of changes or amends requested per year/month
- Average time for requested changes to achieve approval
- Phases of the NPD process that are not raise issues and require potential reengineering
With 4Pack Product Lifecycle Management the workflow becomes intelligent and helps the team meet deadlines. The full end-to-end process can be digitised and can be shared through a specially created processing flow, with tasks, deadlines for steps, validations and notifications, designed to optimise and increase speed to market. Every single phase is monitored through a fully customisable dashboard.
Information such as product specifications, submission forms, artworks and printer proofs can be triggered to be entered, uploaded or generated at the relevant points in the process. All assets and data sits centrally in the cloud-based 4Pack system, integrated with the process flow that initiated it, where all activity is monitored and updated.
As in the preparation of a space launch, the operations are standardised, follow a process in a pre-established order, with tasks assigned to specific stakeholders and alerts that generate notifications, messages and communicate delays.
If problems arise, you can stop the countdown and give “green light” only when they are resolved. After all, it is better to stop the countdown and repair the issues rather than let your new innovation burn up on take-off.
4Pack exists to help Food & Beverage manufacturers and brands of all sizes to push innovative, safer products to market across channels quickly. If you want to turbo charge your product launch process, book a demo with one of our experts.
