Planview PPM Pro: From Grassroots Initiative to Single Source of Truth for Thermo Fisher Scientific

At Thermo Fisher Scientific, innovation is a $1 billion annual investment. An ever-increasing number of report and metric requests, continued new product development growth, and siloed methodologies left Thermo Fisher Scientific with a proliferation of disparate data, tools, and processes across the business. The company needed a flexible and robust solution to address the complex challenges spanning work and teams across the large R&D organization.

To achieve speed-at-scale and deliver on the mission of enabling their customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer, Thermo Fisher Scientific implemented Planview PPM Pro™. As a result, Planview PPM Pro is now the standardized single source of truth across the vast majority of the R&D organization, supporting cross-functional new product development, effective project tracking, and informed decision-making powered by close to real-time data.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is the world leader in serving science. Whether their customers are accelerating life science research, improving patient diagnostics and therapies, or increasing laboratory productivity, Thermo Fisher Scientific’s global team of >75,000 employees is there to support them with an unrivaled combination of innovative technologies and pharmaceutical services.

As a senior portfolio and program management analyst for Thermo Fisher Scientific, Megan Naleway has spent much of her time managing new product introductions and being the steward of the product development process. “More than $1 billion is invested in R&D each year, demonstrating our commitment to advancing science and staying ahead of innovation,” says Naleway.

Organizationally, Thermo Fisher Scientific is an innovative and growing company with an ever-expanding portfolio of new products, resulting in multiple development and financial reporting processes throughout their teams spread across the globe. Disparate parcels of data from myriad sources made it more challenging to get the information they needed to make data-driven decisions. Reporting was also a time-consuming and arduous process.

Both Naleway and SpringBok Solutions’ consultant Brian O’Reilly – who began working with Thermo Fisher Scientific to implement Planview PPM Pro – believed that without overcoming the organizational process challenges within the large R&D organization, it was difficult to validate that the $1B investment towards innovation was being spent as effectively and efficiently as possible.

“So, the opportunity then is how do we get to consistent R&D metrics so that we can compare very different parts of the organization fairly when it comes to product development or approving new ideas,” says Naleway.

First, key metrics needed to be aligned, which meant that data integrity would be critical. Naleway and O’Reilly understood that good data cleanup leads to good data quality, which then leads to consistent and accurate status reporting, and ultimately, better decision making. To accomplish this, all data and metrics needed to make decisions were identified, alignment on definitions were made, and the appropriate sources of truth were determined. Finally, reports and reporting methods were updated. Planview PPM Pro became the solution for capturing program data in one place.

Utilizing Planview PPM Pro’s capabilities, features, and flexibility, data across the company was consolidated, opening up new opportunities for more advanced reporting that revealed the full story about the portfolio, instead of having to look at each program within each silo. With leadership now having access to easily interpreted and comprehensive portfolio information, Thermo Fisher Scientific could better support their highest priority programs by removing roadblocks and increasing resources as needed. Also, leadership could more readily identify programs that didn’t meet the criteria for moving forward before releasing large amounts of funding.

The data maintained within Planview PPM Pro was also used to analyze other aspects of programs across the new product life cycle, such as having too many programs in the same commercialization phase, which can overwhelm the resources needed to execute. Resource allocation and capacity data in Planview PPM Pro helped Thermo Fisher Scientific to determine the details on how and if the scope, resources, or timelines needed to be adjusted to ensure as many successful launches as feasible.

Regarding the implementation of Planview PPM Pro, Naleway says, “Having this single source of truth for program data has enabled us to advance our reporting for more real-time decisions using close to real-time data.”

Planview PPM Pro got its start at Thermo Fisher Scientific through a grassroots initiative within one division. Since then, adoption has grown to 11 divisions – Planview PPM Pro is now being used by 85% of the organization where R&D dollars are invested. Through these efforts, in one division of Thermo Fisher Scientific, they were able to build efficiencies that decreased the amount of time their PMO was spending on reporting alone by an astonishing 95%!

“By having a significant portion of the company using Planview PPM Pro, the opportunities for identifying gaps have accelerated. This enables us to solve challenges faster and also creates opportunity,” says Naleway

Having collected and validated their data, Thermo Fisher Scientific now looks to use some of the more advanced features of Planview PPM Pro, like Predictive Portfolio Analysis, to drive strategic decisions in the one to five-year timeframe and tactical decisions in the three to 12-month time frame.

To learn more about what Planview® solutions can do for your organization, visit Planview.com.