Overview
The process of starting from an idea and turning it into a successful product takes careful research, collaboration, content generation, review, and approvals. Every organization has dozens of similarly structured processes: a series of phases (i.e., stages) and approvals (i.e., gates), requiring tight coordination across roles and teams.
These expensive, critical processes are core to how organizations grow, but the overhead of running the process itself can be cumbersome: what stage is the idea in? Who has what task? What were the conditions of any given approval to get through that gate?
Macedon’s Stage and Gate solution offers a streamlined and cost-effective approach to constructing entire workflows in a matter of minutes. The solution leverages the power of Appian’s low-code BPM tools but reduces the upfront setup effort to near zero. Using a guided configuration tool, Stage and Gate delivers a truly no-code experience.
Key Features & Functionality
Customizable. Configure custom stage-gate workflows through straightforward Admin pages, saving time and money on creating tailored project management processes. Any number of stages are supported, with a wide range of voting styles available at each gate, such as vote-based, sequential, or automatic type voting, to ensure thorough evaluation and reduce decision-making delays. This one centralized system can accommodate your business process and still give you a single place to find all your critical stage-gate process progress.
Secure. Designate who can view, facilitate, and administer each stage-gate workflow to ensure that the right people are involved and informed throughout the process. Innate role-based security with predefined access levels assigned with intuitive front-end management. Each step along the way also includes an audit trail, so you can see exactly what actions were taken at any time. You will always know that only the right eyes are seeing your valuable industry secrets, reducing the chance your ideas could be stolen by a competitor.
Accurate. Define custom templates, tie SLAs to stages, and create tasks required at each stage to guide users through completion, boost project consistency, minimize errors, and foster compliance with organizational standards. The decision-makers at each gate will have all the information they need in order to make effective decisions quickly, optimizing each meeting and shepherding the best ideas through at optimum speed.
Transparent. All projects across the organization that the user has access to can be seen in a centralized dashboard to gain a comprehensive, real-time summary of ongoing projects and their progress. Not only can decision-makers see the specific ideas in the queue, but they can compare the progress of that item against the others that will be coming soon to help prioritize their time and resources to the ones with the highest potential.
Benefits & Business Impact
Macedon’s turn-key Stage & Gate solution enables rapid configuration of processes that require a high degree of scrutiny. Phases of work (Stages) are linked with structured and validated deliverables alongside context-driven collaboration where progress can be tracked. Stages are followed by decision points (Gates), where approvers evaluate if the proposed work is ready to proceed to the next phase.
Stage and Gate is adaptable and can accommodate changing business requirements with guided configuration and easy-to-use administrative tools. By remaining industry and process agnostic, the solution caters to each organization/department/team by delivering on their distinct needs without sacrificing the ability to standardize and retain robust audit logs.
All users are provided with a powerful dashboard where they can easily locate and act on the highest priority items. Tasks, deadlines, and approval requests are aggregated together for one-click access to the work at hand, alongside summary statistics and high-level reports for greater visibility.
Stage and Gate offers an incredibly fast and reliable way to implement structure around mission-critical approval processes without bogging down your development teams or overcomplicating the user experience.