How an International Leader in Beauty Products Accelerated New Product Development by Enhancing Cross-Functional Capabilities

The new product development process for a global consumer beauty product leader required a high degree of collaboration, relying on input from cross-functional stakeholders at every stage of the product lifecycle. Global alignment was crucial for bringing new product launches to market, but the organization lacked end-to-end visibility for its complex portfolio of products across the global enterprise. They also faced challenges with their gate management process, which depended on loose methods to score, identify, and prioritize new products. Additionally, achieving stakeholder alignment on new product launches required custom, ad-hoc reports that were extremely complex and manually intensive to produce.

To enhance collaboration capabilities, improve cross-functional communication, and achieve global alignment in their new product development processes, the consumer beauty products manufacturer implemented the Planview Product Portfolio Management solution. Planview replaced siloed tools and manual workflows with a centralized platform, providing stakeholders with end-to-end visibility throughout the product portfolio. The beauty products leader improved stakeholder communication and streamlined the gate review process using Planview's algorithmic scoring system, which automated project scoring and provided the status of all projects in one consolidated view. They also integrated Planview with Anaplan, providing stakeholders with direct visibility into critical financial KPIs at every gate review, improving risk mitigation.

Originally founded in the early 1900s as a fragrance house in Paris, this beauty products organization has grown over the last century into a worldwide corporation that manufactures and distributes products in more than 130 countries. As an international leader in their market, they aim to empower forward-thinking beauty through products that provide new, innovative, and science-based solutions. Since its origin, this organization has helped shape the beauty industry through its continuously innovative product portfolios, composed of over 50 iconic beauty brands, including licensed and proprietary products, with price points ranging from luxury to mass market.

As a global beauty corporation responsible for a complex product portfolio of over 50 brands, they relied on a highly collaborative, cross-functional process to successfully launch products. New product launches required stakeholder input and cross-functional alignment at every stage of the product lifecycle, and collaboration spanned multiple functional areas such as R&D packaging, R&D formula, brand managers, marketing managers, finance, and supply chain.

The beauty product organization’s reliance on collaboration and communication between stakeholders across the global enterprise created significant challenges due to the complexity of its gate management process. Creating and maintaining their “innovation master plan” – an international alignment calendar that tracks product launches over a five-year horizon – only added to an already intricate process.

To start, the organization lacked a single source of truth that gave stakeholders an aggregated view of all product launches and their status across the global enterprise. This knowledge gap forced stakeholders to rely on siloed tools, emails, and manual updates to understand the status of each product launch.

Cross-functional global alignment and effective collaboration were vital in supporting new product launches. Still, the beauty powerhouse faced challenges with the complex manual processes required to produce its innovation master plan.

They also saw a significant opportunity to improve their gate review and approval process, which relied on stakeholders manually scoring readiness-based projects. Additionally, stakeholders lacked access to the crucial financial KPIs needed to inform go/no-go decision-making and mitigate risk at each project gate review.

Lastly, for a holistic end-to-end view of product launches across the global corporation, leaders had to rely on custom, ad-hoc reports that were manually intensive to produce.

In 2014, the international beauty product leader expanded their instance of Planview Project Portfolio Management solution with bi-directional integration into ServiceNow as their preferred IT project management solution utilized by 120 users to manage 150 projects.

To streamline the complexity of their new product development processes and eliminate the manual workflows required to achieve global alignment, they deployed Planview a second time. This implementation of Planview’s Product Portfolio Management solution improved three key areas: project reviews and communication, gate management, and reporting and analytics. In this deployment, the beauty product organization added 800 users to the platform to manage 2000 new product development projects.

Using Planview's customizable column sets, the beauty product manufacturer was able to configure an aggregated view of all product launches across all functional areas of the global organization. This single source of truth streamlined global alignment for stakeholders, laying the foundation for the organization to automate a new product launch scoring system and establish a readiness roadmap checklist.

To quickly understand the status of products based on their gate review readiness, the beauty product organization utilized Planview’s algorithmic scoring system, which automatically scored projects from 0-100 based on stakeholder input. Portfolio managers could then leverage this project readiness data to generate agenda summary reports, which extracted a list of all projects ready for review and were used to structure cross-functional gate review meetings.

The global beauty product manufacturer also completed a successful Planview integration with the financial platform Anaplan, which provided stakeholders with critical financial performance metrics for each product, informing decision-making at every gate review. This integration strengthened risk mitigation, improved investment decision-making confidence, and eliminated duplicative work of accessing financial data on multiple platforms.

Using Planview as a centralized intake for product data also enabled them to replace the complicated, manual process previously required to generate their innovation master plan. They were also able to generate a robust custom report for new product launches over a five-year horizon based on data collected across the enterprise. This report could be easily customized to highlight essential parameters like Innovation Type, House, Brand, Fiscal Year, Quarter, or Month. The innovation master plan could then be integrated with collaborative roadmaps to show the impact of new product development on business outcomes.

Planview’s Product Portfolio Management solution helped usher in a more efficient approach to cross-functional collaboration in new product development, aligning global stakeholders at every point in the product lifecycle.

By eliminating manual workflows, the beauty product organization could more efficiently maintain and track global product launches, generate complex, custom reports for global alignment, and manage financial data across multiple platforms.

Additionally, by replacing time-consuming and duplicative manual tasks, Planview provided stakeholders with a centralized platform to perform gate reviews and approvals, automatically score projects for gate readiness, access product performance KPIs, and generate robust global reports based on product launch data.

These capabilities helped streamline the new product development process, enhancing collaboration and communication throughout the global enterprise and reducing cycle time.

After deploying Planview in 2017 to manage their new product development process, strategic growth for the international beauty product leader continued. In 2020, they expanded their Planview implementation to support internal order users across 1000 projects with SAP bi-directional functionality.

Drawing on ten years of experience implementing Planview solutions to optimize product portfolio management, the beauty product organization’s Global Director for IT Governance and PMO shares his key insights for organizations embarking on a similar journey: