Captaré Consulting reduces Goody® Products, Inc.'s New Product Development Process by more than 40%

Goody® Products, Inc. is a leading retail manufacturer that has implemented a new web site created by Captaré Consulting for their New Product Development (NPD) lifecycle to better support its operations worldwide. Its existing business process was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and the business workflow had become convoluted. The new solution, offered by Microsoft Partner Captaré Consulting, resulted in the New Product Development (NPD) web site, which is based on Microsoft technologies. In addition, Captaré Consulting provided Goody the support, training and user documentation to enable employees and vendors to use the NPD web site to its optimal capability. This solution has resulted in a reliable architecture with improved information management capabilities. Goody® Products, Inc. can now provide its users and vendors with better accessibility to product information, increased availability of documentation, an effective communication forum, and a stable platform on which the company can build on in the future.

Business Challenge
Goody® Products, Inc. has contracts in place with retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target, which require delivering numerous new products several times each year. Each new product delivery is the result of Goody® Products, Inc. New Product Development (NPD) process.

Because Goody® Products, Inc. has offices in six countries worldwide, the ability to share knowledge and information among globally dispersed teams, as well as product vendors, is critical to effectively identify a solid product idea and bring the product to market. Information sharing and collaboration are especially important to the sales teams, which target and respond to large new business opportunities globally. When the NPD team at Goody® Products, Inc. would have an idea for a new product, it would mobilize all of its resources to respond; speed and quality of response were critical to a product's lifecycle. Team members sent e-mails to team members, requesting examples of products or proposals for product ideas.
Each product cycle process consumed an average of 435 man days and required:

• Sifting through 600-700 Product ideas.
• Selecting which products will be marketed
• Contracting with Asian vendors
• Shipping the final products to retailers globally

Frequently, it took weeks to find and organize the information that the NPD team needed to respond to a new Product idea. As deadlines rapidly approached, the NPD team would stop searching or waiting and reluctantly re-create Product idea proposals. In addition, when products were not produced to specification or did not meet Goody® Products, Inc. quality criteria, parts of the product production cycle were repeated (perhaps numerous times); this ultimately caused delayed product shipments to retailers. What resulted were multiple concurrent cycles within the NPD process, which produced unnecessarily more than 2000 unique product SKUs per year.

In 2004, prior to implementing the NPD web site created by Captaré Consulting, Goody® Products, Inc. spent more than $400,000 just to express ship products to meet product placement deadlines.

It became clear to Goody® Products, Inc. that it needed a solution that would give its NPD employees access to product ideas and information they needed to:

• Streamline the NPD cycle
• Manage documents effectively
• Ultimately lower the cost to bring a new product to market
• Solution

Goody® Products, Inc.'s Purchasing and Inventory Management team researched the time and expenses associated with creating new products. The team found that there were more than 200 tasks within six stages of the NPD lifecycle. Then they determined the time and staffing requirements for each task. What they found there were profound inefficiencies in communicating information and document sharing. Furthermore, they found ways they could collaborate better with their vendors. After discussing these results with the IT Management Team, both agreed a more streamlined process would reduce the company’s expenses for bringing a new product to market.

The solution?
The Manager of IT determined a NPD web site that would be built on Microsoft® SharePoint® technologies that could facilitate effective communication within the NPD team and Goody® Products, Inc. vendors. However, his team did not have the experience with Microsoft® SharePoint® Services needed to produce the desired solution. He turned to Captaré Consulting, who recommended an array of Microsoft® products to provide a robust platform using SharePoint Portal Server® and Microsoft® SharePoint® Services as its base. Captaré Consulting also recommended InfoPath® to standardize and streamline data gathering during the NPD lifecycle. To minimize costs to create the web site, Captaré Consulting also recommended the use of CorasWorks Workplace Suite for their navigation and roll-up capabilities while proposing K2.net Enterprise Workflow Server as the workflow engine.

The NPD web site is essentially a 3-tier web site ­ NPD web site, Program Sites, and Product Sites. In addition, vendors have their own Vendor web sites, which enable them to view product images and documentation specifically pertaining to the products for which they are responsible in bringing to market.

Despite Goody® Products, Inc.'s success, the company wanted to bring its employees, vendors, and knowledge together globally to form a highly productive NPD team that could quickly access pertinent information to bring new products to market quickly and complete projects efficiently. The SharePoint® sites, referred as "Program Sites" and "Product Sites," provide access to essential information, including documentation, product design, and vendor information. As a direct result, the NPD team now responds to new opportunities faster and has increased their new Product Close Rate (PCR).

Benefits
Captaré Consulting found a way to optimize information flow between NPD employees and vendors. With the help of Microsoft® SharePoint® Services, SharePoint Portal® and InfoPath® Products, Goody has significantly improved team productivity. The end result is a portal based solution that streamlines the NPD process that provides a system for collaboration, workflow and insight into a product's life cycle. The portal allows vendors access to their own custom Vendor sites, where collaboration, communication and progress tracking on product specifications and quotes occur.

Today, NPD employees benefit from:
• Superior ability to store and retrieve documents
• Fewer versioning issues and errors due to central document and image storage
• Enhanced communication through shared calendars, discussion boards, and task lists
• Secure and controlled access to proprietary information

The NPD web site was launched in October 2005 and is used in six countries by more than 100 Goody personnel and 20 Asian vendors. Training was offered to all Goody® Products, Inc. NPD employees, as well as a NPD Web Site User Guide. Goody® Products, Inc. projects they will reduce the time required for one production cycle from 435 man days to less than 250 man days ­ more than a 40% reduction - and save more than $1 million per year. Goody® Products, Inc. is already seeing early dividends. They have approximately 20 people who create the original new product concepts. They enter the information on InfoPath® forms that contain standardized formatting and automation, streamlining the capture of data while reducing errors. The company has found that it takes approximately 1/3 the time to produce product specifications as it did prior to using InfoPath®. Captaré Consulting is dedicated to improving its clients' bottom line through streamlining business processes and improving communication efforts among employees. Captaré Consulting provides services based on Microsoft® SharePoint® Services, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and InfoPath software, and its consultants have expertise in the latest technology, marketing, sales, delivery, and knowledge management.