Idea to Launch - New Product Development

Overview

Organizations unable to quickly adapt to their changing market lose revenue, market share, and customers. Capital budgeting and new product development is critical to their health, but most companies depend on spreadsheets to manage this process.

Spreadsheets are vulnerable to unauthorized access, data loss, and errors as users share this information across (or outside of) the organization. This lack of security can lead to financial loss, reduced customer trust, and sensitive data becoming available to competitors.

A typical, healthy organization may have over a hundred ideas in the pipeline. For each of these potential products, multiple departments contribute to analyzing and preparing the ideas for development, but without a visible and standardized process, this collaboration may run into major roadblocks or - even worse - the highest value product ideas may be overlooked.

With many products in development, managers and approvers struggle to track individual progress and next steps required for each product in the pipeline. Approvers often need to chase down information to make well-informed decisions, costing valuable employee time and delaying new product launches. And, without dependable auditing, individual decisions to accept or reject an idea (and why) cannot be tracked, causing possible regulatory ramifications.

With the ever increasing speed of innovation every industry has experienced, expensive misses like this can break an organization.

Key Features & Functionality

I2L simplifies the new product development workflow and subsequent capital budgeting into standardized steps with important requirements and approvals that can be tailored to your organization’s needs.

Team members are guided through Ideation, Screening, Development, Final Business Case & Marketing Plan, and Launch. Each stage includes a set of tasks to be completed, documentation, data fields, and approval steps.

At a higher level, potential revenue and progress can be easily displayed directly on the main dashboard for at-a-glance reporting.

• Intuitive: Out-of-the-box drillable Dashboards show all information associated with products you have visibility into in one place. Custom reporting options are available including NPV, IRR, revenue projections, and estimated costs. Tasks are automatically routed and displayed on Dashboards specific to each person. Administrators can set SLAs to communicate urgency and help everyone prioritize work.
• Integrated: Use your existing product data from SAP or other critical systems.
• Audited: Approvals are tracked and accessed in Process Performance reports, helping to provide accountability across the team.
• Configurable: Administrators can easily create and tailor product development processes to your needs, including customized stages and gates (decision points); participants, their roles, and permissions; and the decision method used to “pass” each gate.
• Secure: All users are authenticated and are only shown information for products which they are actively working on to prevent sensitive details from being exposed to competitors.

Benefits & Business Impact

I2L saves your organization time and money while keeping your data easily accessible to those who need it, and locked away from those who don't. I2L is easily adapted to meet your needs, and can seamlessly integrate with your other systems using Appian's low-code integration tools. The workflow structure, approvals, and permissions can all be configured with zero development, keeping your maintenance costs down while allowing for rapid changes to stay ahead of the competition.

One customer experienced the following improvements to their business using this solution:

• 57% less C-Suite review time necessary
• $240,000+ annual savings per process - ROI within 6 months
• Priceless. Keeping trade secrets safe and making better choices

This solution provides improved visibility into potentially hundreds of products being developed by using dashboards to show users their work and statuses instead of relying on overwhelming spreadsheets shared across departments. Centralized information storage ensures that each product can be prioritized based on its projected revenue, costs, and estimated delivery date while securely providing details to the team members that need it.

Task assignments keep users focused while allowing administrators to incorporate SLAs into assignments to ensure projects remain on-time. Tasks are audited to track completion time, and ensure teams have a clear picture of each product status and their responsibilities per required SLAs. Any organization using I2L can modify the verbiage, stages, data fields, and approval flows to meet the unique requirements of their business making I2L the perfect accelerator to form the foundation of any new product.