With competition in the globalized marketplace intensifying more and more every day, Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail companies have been hit with increased demand for product innovation to enhance brand equity and differentiation and drive consumer loyalty.
But developing the next revolutionary product line isn’t as simple as televisions shows like Shark Tank make it seem. Behind these rare instances of success trail a preponderance of prototype failures. The rate of success is in fact so marginal that most products never even make it past the drawing board. Did you know: More than 95% of prototype formulations end up failing? This probably makes you wonder what those 5% of winning products did that the others didn’t. Let’s take a look at the key challenges responsible for keeping most products from achieving success – and discover how the winning 5% are able to power through them.
1) Avoiding Regulatory Setbacks while Shortening ‘Time-to-Market’
One of the key root causes of a company’s failure to deliver a product to market is its inability to sustain regulatory compliance. More often than not, brand and contract manufacturers manage compliancy using incongruent tools and isolated processes that make it nearly impossible to monitor developmental progress let alone adhere to evolving parameters. When it comes to regulation, successful product engineers understand the importance of being prepared for government inspection.
Failing to meet operating standards could mean delays in product release times or (in drastic cases) being forced to recall an entire product line. In an industry as fierce as CPG, manufacturers can’t afford to put up with costly launch delays. To avoid speed bumps along the innovation race, manufacturers must make every effort to prevent falling victim to non-compliance, or risk losing their pace.
Successful R&D organizations are equipped with tools like regulatory documentation management systems that perform continuous evaluation on material compliance and alert manufacturing teams to potential regulatory infringements. These systems ensure the quick adaptation of global formulas to protect against the negative ramifications of non-compliance. Proactive brand manufacturers using intelligent regulatory systems, can spend less time managing compliance data…and more time on product innovation.
2) Making Inaccessible Information, Accessible
Aside from regulatory failures, delayed product test results ultimately prevent many innovators from finding the right ingredients for their new product recipe. The changing landscape of regulation makes the accessibility to direct information no easy task for product engineers managing multiple development projects. An organization’s agility and capacity for collaboration are the deciding factors in determining who wins the race for new product delivery.
Creating the Perfect Product is a team effort – between marketing, R&D, legal, regulatory, purchasing and manufacturing teams. Effectively managing a collaborative joint effort across multiple silos and channels is where almost all product innovation organizations come up short and become disoriented. Smart innovators understand that the access to product information across all channels of the manufacturing organization is imperative for maximizing operational efficiency throughout the product development process.
To address this need, Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail companies rely on platforms with collaborative project management capabilities to increase productivity for new formulation creation by linking ongoing project and program execution with continuously-updated information in real-time. Maintaining relevancy and accuracy across all fields eliminates time-consuming protocols and formulation redundancy, provides stronger management over outcomes and leverages findings from research and testing.
Making strategic resource planning easier and more flexible empowers CPG brand and contract manufacturers to learn and implement practices most conducive to innovation. Equipped with the capability to recycle discoveries from past projects, this enhanced visibility of asset information allows product engineers to optimize time and resources as they continuously formulate and track their progress.
3) Expanding Formula Design Efforts without Increasing Resources
In an industry dealing with intricate recipes and powerful ingredients, R&D organizations in the CPG & Retail industry have one main focus when it comes to formula design – delivering the product promise which maximizes consumer satisfaction and drives usage and loyalty. A successful consumer product experience stems directly from a product’s performance, and hence, the product formula.
The delivery of an effective formula design calls for continuous innovation of product composition. Formulators need greater visibility from a material perspective – a robust management solution that manages the components required for the product formula while leveraging the most efficient use of resources at hand.
With the means to perform cost optimization on potential product compositions, CPG formulators can secure the knowledge to make optimal material choices during the early phases of the innovation process to satisfy the marketing requirements of ever-changing consumer trends.
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