Sometimes it’s difficult to put your finger on the problem. You’re a company in the Consumer Packaged Goods space,and you know you should be launching the next product innovation faster. This is the mantra after every initiative review: “we’ll do better on the next initiative.” Yet, like Groundhog Day, you run into the same inefficiencies time after time. What makes the inefficiency so challenging to pinpoint is that it’s not just one thing or just one department. The inefficiencies that can bog down your innovation processes are systemic in nature and occur in many different areas.
The Right Info at the Right Time
Co-workers seem to ask ad-nauseam: “didn’t you get the updated report?” This might lead you to wonder how many times CPG companies work with outdated information. According to Tech-Clarity research, it’s about 25% of the time. Think about that – more than one day of the week, you are working on analysis of old data or reporting with information that is no longer current. This inefficiency causes a massive amount of rework and adds stress to the system. One way to avoid the cyclical nature of outdated innovation is to make sure your data is digital. If you’re managing your project initiatives and data reporting with 
Excel, you are managing it electronically. The difference between electronic and digital, in a nutshell, is that electronic data can be manipulated and stored on a laptop. Digital data, however, exists across different systems and can frequently be described as a ‘single source of truth.’ Many CPG companies are moving toward managing their data digitally in order to drive inefficiencies out of the system.
Internal and External Communication Woes
The ecosystems for initiatives which include multiple internal departments and external agencies are large and getting more complex every day. This complexity
leads to problems in areas such as communication. With email communication, reaching the person you need to reach in a timely manner and getting a quick response can be a crap shoot. It’s not that people are unreliable….it’s that they are as busy as you and are likely not focusing on the same projects. Reaching out to external agencies to get updated information, for example, can take time as you are valued, but probably not at the top of the recipient’s priority list since they are likely juggling multiple clients.
(Data points provided by Tech-Clarity, Inc.)
CPG companies must break the cycle of inefficiency, or they are bound to repeat the same shortcomings again and again. Getting your ecosystem on the same page to drive innovation ‘better, faster, cheaper’ is an imperative. Understand the areas your company can target to drive out inefficiency and what you may be able to do about it with this short video. Once you watch this three-minute video, you’ll have access to a whitepaper on concurrent packaging design, and a better understanding of how your CPG company can break the cycle of inefficiency and drive innovation with speed.
In addition, if you’d like to learn more please head over to our resource center to download our latest white paper “Packaging that Sells – A Systematic Approach” written by Jeffrey Hill & Julie Fraser of IYNO.
