How H.B. Fuller Improved Product Development Efficiency and Prioritization

At any given time, H.B. Fuller can have up to 1,800 projects in their queue in pending, open, active, or requested status. The home-grown portfolio management tool previously used to manage those projects required substantial manual input and often was a source of process inefficiency. As that tool neared its end of life, the team began looking for an outside vendor that offered a solution with better resource planning, enhanced project prioritization, and the ability to assign individual tasks. It was also crucial that this solution acted as the go-to source for all the information needed on a particular project.

H.B. Fuller selected Planview’s Product Portfolio Management solution because it best meets their needs for prioritizing and optimizing projects. It also helps them understand new products' global impact by providing insights from market, regional, and technology perspectives.

“Our previous solution had plenty of constraints and required a lot of heavy lifting. Now, with Planview, we have a one-stop shop for understanding everything that’s going on from a project standpoint,” says Erin Johnson, Director of Hygiene Health & Consumables (HHC) Product, Project Management (PM&M) at H.B. Fuller. “Planview has become the communication piece that enables us to be accountable to the plan we initiated when the project was first inspired. The result is better innovation in a desired time frame with fewer pushbacks or delays.”

As the largest pureplay adhesives company in the world, H.B. Fuller’s innovative, functional coatings, adhesives and sealants enhance the quality, safety and performance of products people use every day. Founded in 1887, their mission to Connect What Matters is brought to life by more than 7,000 global team members who collaborate with customers across more than 30 market segments in over 140 countries to develop highly specified solutions that enable customers to bring world-changing innovations to their end markets.

H.B. Fuller had been using a homegrown innovation and product management portal that required intensive manual effort, often leading to workflow inefficiencies. For example, stage gate discussions were pushed back because of delays and slowdowns in data collection for project review presentations. In addition, the team needed a more effective way to optimize their resources, prioritize projects, and manage time during stages one and two of review. All this needed to happen before resources were assigned to projects in various states in their portfolio.

As the homegrown solution reached its end, the team began looking for an outside vendor with a more robust solution.

Planview’s Product Portfolio Management solution met most of the criteria on the PM&M team’s 100-item wish list, including its ability to help with resource planning and consolidate project information into a singular point of reference. Moreover, the Project and Portfolio Highlight Report within Portfolios aligned perfectly with their early vision of an effective tool, helping team members prepare for stage gate conversations quickly and easily. This single capability would enable them to reduce review prep time from days to minutes.

“Planview has become my one-stop shop for understanding everything going on from a project standpoint at H.B. Fuller. I can communicate within the various tasks and have direct conversations with the people directly involved in any specific task,” says Johnson. “It’s an interactive, task-driven tool that helps my team members see what they need to see. I get an easy way to organize information at the project management level that allows me to take my team through a stage gate review in about 30 minutes instead of days with the old system.”

In just one year since implementation, the HHC organization, empowered by the PM&M office, is now moving projects through stage gates and delivering faster thanks in part to Planview’s Product Portfolio Management solution. Moreover, the team spends the appropriate amount of time in stages to evaluate projects and products, gaining more clarity on the best path forward. In addition, they have a new product tracking system that shows a direct connection between innovation and revenue.

Business leaders responsible for understanding the products in their portfolio also benefit from Planview by partnering with the PM&M team to get a clear line of sight on projects being added. The R&D department, which has historically struggled to balance capacity, uses Planview to better understand which projects it should work on, driving consistent focus on what matters most for H.B. Fuller.

Finally, projects are seeing better participation from the commercial sales roles in the early stages of project development. When the commercial team requests a project from the PM&M team, they are included in stages 1 and 2, allowing them to apply their market insight in developing the value proposition. When a project reaches the launch/commercialization stage, commercial sales teams have already approved messaging they can take to market, giving them a crucial advantage.

As H.B. Fuller expands its adoption of Planview, its internal onboarding team is expanding to include representatives from each business within the hygiene and health organization, ensuring consistent implementation. The goal is to eventually have a project management center of excellence anchored by Planview.