A Single Source of Truth: How a PLM Solution Drives Faster, More Informed Decision-Making in NPD
New product development (NPD) is an all-hands-on-deck affair. The process involves professionals across multiple departments within an organisation and requires the successful completion of many steps, each of which comes with its own complexities and intricacies. It can also be something of a gamble if not handled with care and supported by technology for the job, as the average cost of a new product launch is above $100,000, but 80 to 90% of new products fail.
The fact that this initiative is challenging can’t hold manufacturers back, though, especially not if they specialise in the fast-moving consumer goods categories of food, beverages, personal care or cosmetics. These markets are particularly subject to consumers’ evershifting preferences, making innovation through NPD among the top priorities for businesses in those industries. After all, if your brand is to remain relevant and promote loyalty, you need to be seen as a leader in your space.
So, what is it that underpins successful NPD? It is establishing a “single source of truth”. Eliminating data silos and establishing transparency of information across the organisation, will facilitate interdepartmental collaboration and cohesion that is critical to successful product innovation. Visibility and insight into accurate data is also crucial to maintain consistency across your processes while also aligning to emergent trends.
There’s no solution that helps you accomplish those goals better than purpose-built product lifecycle management (PLM) software. It enables faster, more informed decisionmaking and as an organisation-wide platform that ties together all parties engaged in NPD, it allows everyone to work from the same “playbook” and acts as a unified repository for all relevant information.
Now, to paint a more complete picture of these systems—including the features and benefits they offer manufacturers of food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics goods—let’s dive deeper into the functions and tools they provide for each facet of NPD. Along the way, we’ll also take a look at some of the key differentiators that set Aptean PLM Lascom Edition apart and make it the industry-specific solution of choice for businesses looking to gain a competitive edge.
Consumer packaged goods companies have caught on to this reality, with 85% indicating that PLM is critical for digital transformation.
Achieve Greater Accuracy and Visibility with PLM Features for Specification and Document Management
Your NPD-focused team members are tasked with not only coming up with original concepts and improved versions of existing offerings, but also dialing in the specifications of the finished goods with precision. That requires testing and iteration—not to mention clear and detailed records of your results along the way to carry out tweaks or even larger changes in direction. With a PLM in place, everyone has easy access to the same information, helping to prevent errors and save time.
There are other ways your staff will benefit—all data tied to ingredients and components is stored in a shared repository for easy access, so everyone is only a few clicks away from getting the information they need. It’s also maintained in a highly visible and accessible fashion to streamline testing, iterating on existing products, creating new variations and working with new components.
“We see implementing Aptean PLM Lascom Edition as an opportunity to forge better practices among our teams regarding data and document management, for instance.”
IT Business Manager, Yanbal
In addition, PLM solutions with electronic document management (EDM) simplify and digitise the record-keeping process, tying the virtual versions of the relevant paperwork to your products as they move forward to launch. Meanwhile, users can increase their efficiency by leveraging the search functionalities.These crawl documents based on keywords entered, and the software can automatically generate product specification documents based on stored templates.
Aptean PLM Lascom Edition goes even further in specification and documentation management than your average solution, with a Supplier Portal that allows partners to directly feed component and packaging details into the shared platform. What’s more, Aptean’s PLM for food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics manufacturers also has built-in USDA National Nutrient, CIQUAL and INCI databases for easy access to universal information, including the standard values and nomenclature required on product labels and forms. The software can also automatically generate nutritional values and component panels, helping to ensure accuracy of this vital information.
Industry Spotlight: Beverages
Let’s illustrate the benefits of Aptean PLM Lascom Edition’s specification management functionalities by demonstrating their potential applications for a beverage manufacturer preparing to launch a lower-calorie version of their sports drink. We’ll assume the business’s developers decide to use sucralose as a sweetening agent in place of sugar to produce the desired end product.
With Aptean’s PLM software in place, the business’s NPD team can use the pre-existing documentation for their original sports drink and make the necessary changes to the ingredient list and nutritional values without having to start from scratch. The company’s employees don’t have to spend time hunting for the information they need—it’s all at their fingertips, helping to accelerate the process.
Drive Innovation and Accessibility with PLM Features for Product Design Management
For such an exacting and demanding undertaking as new product design, your dedicated professionals need access to the specialised tools and information relevant to their role in the process. An industry-specific PLM system can quickly deliver what they require and allow your business to manage the creation process at a component level from planning to launch, including all versions of and iterations on the item explored along the way.
Leading PLM solutions offer categorisation and search capabilities to make finding the right information a simpler and faster process. The classification functions of Aptean PLM Lascom Edition are powered by our integrated Business Intelligence (BI) application, helping to make your workers’ fact-finding efforts more effective and comprehensive.
Food and beverage companies can take advantage of automatic generation of ingredient and allergen lists based on U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and CIQUAL databases, while personal care and cosmetics brands can do the same with features that pull directly from published INCI materials.
Powerful recipe and formula tools can identify the type and amount of every component used in each product, ensuring greater formula accuracy by automatically generating the Product Information File (PIF), ingredient lists, nutritional facts and costs based on components used.
These capabilities, available in Aptean PLM Lascom Edition’s Supplier Portal, facilitate collaboration with external partners helping your internal teams tweak offerings as close to perfection as possible. At the same time, our software’s advanced formulation features can cross-check an item’s current parameters with those in the product brief to ensure alignment.
Finally, Aptean PLM’s advanced search functionality allows users to index any component, product feature or specific item that has been inputted into the system. This helps to eliminate duplication of effort, as those users who access the system later can simply execute a quick query and be served the information they need without manually entering it themselves, saving time and reducing errors.
Industry Spotlight: Personal Care
To see how the advanced formulation tools of Aptean PLM Lascom Edition could serve a personal care product manufacturer, imagine the business is working on a new hair conditioner. In the original product brief, it was specified that this variety would be targeted toward consumers with fine or brittle hair, and thus panthenol—a B vitamin that helps improve moisture retention—was to be included.
When sourcing the ingredients for internal testing, though, panthenol was inadvertently left off the list for procurement and thus not included in the formula in the initial test batches. The software would identify this misalignment with the original product brief and alert the designers to the discrepancy so that it could be rectified, and panthenol could be purchased and incorporated to ensure the conditioner delivers on its value proposition and bolsters your brand’s reputation for consistent quality.
Strengthen Collaboration and Efficiency with PLM Features for Project and Task Management
As vital as it is for your designers to dig into the details of your new offerings and craft the ideal product parameters, it’s also critical for your NPD project managers to have a highlevel, holistic view of the process to keep things moving along—both internally and externally. Thankfully, PLM software helps you create a logical process flow and observable milestones for managers to maintain greater control of achievements against timelines.
Advanced solutions like Aptean PLM Lascom Edition let you monitor team workloads, flag bottlenecks and identify delays so that any issues holding back your progress can be resolved. That helps keep everyone on the same page but also contributes to another key benefit of PLM platforms—faster time to market, which, as we alluded to before, is especially important in trend-driven industries like food, beverages, personal care and cosmetics.
Additionally, Aptean’s software provides task management and organisation features. Easy-to-read Gantt charts offer all parties involved visibility into the current state of projects and what’s next on the docket. Meanwhile, the advanced workflow engine helps you maintain forward momentum, allowing for assignment of tasks to specific users, a facilitated approval process and the detection of anomalies through intelligent system-side monitoring capabilities.
There are also our system’s robust program management tools, which allow manufacturers to organise several individual projects related to a product or line of products into an overarching “program” that shares a unified body of documentation and data. This means changes made to a product (or its packaging and labeling) can be accounted for when working on another product under the same program, which helps maintain consistency across interrelated items.
Lastly, it’s important to note that the Supplier Portal contributes here as well, as it facilitates tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) by vendor to ensure that goals are being met. A variety of criteria can be evaluated to ensure that you’re getting what you need out of your partnerships while also mitigating the cost of your inputs and the overall NPD process.
Industry Spotlight: Cosmetics
As an example of Aptean PLM Lascom Edition’s program management features at work in the cosmetics industry, consider the case of a manufacturer developing a new line of lipsticks. When each different colour variety is grouped together under the same program, any changes in formula made while testing one variety can automatically be carried over to others in
Likewise, any necessary disclosures on packaging regarding the materials used can be applied to all varieties, as they’re all linked together by the unifying program in the PLM software. By making such important information highly visible for everyone involved, the business can improve efficiency in NPD while also ensuring they’re covered with regard to labels and
Promote Consistency and Assurance with PLM Features for Quality and Compliance Management
Meeting the quality standards of your brand, as well as the expectations of customers, is an essential part of NPD, especially considering that the proliferation of new products brings with it additional competition on store shelves. Reasonable assurance of regulatory compliance is also indispensable, as the average $5.87 million loss in revenue and $14 million total cost of a non-compliance event represent significant setbacks to be avoided by any means necessary.
PLM solutions can improve your outcomes in these areas. For example, software built for the food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics industries can automatically record all quality events and store that information for future reference. Compliance can be checked against regulatory libraries, and alerts automatically deployed when risk of violation is detected, or allergens aren’t being properly disclosed.
Any allergen declarations must be included on food and beverage product packaging, and personal care and cosmetic goods also must come with transparent communication regarding the presence of materials that can affect the health of consumers with sensitivities. That’s one of the key reasons we built Aptean PLM Lascom Edition with flexible integrated labeling tools that support multiple languages and regional formats.
As for the ever-important PIF, we developed our solution with capabilities to cover that too. The software can automate many portions of the PIF creation process and streamlines collaborative efforts between internal teams and any external stakeholders involved. The system can even deploy automatic notifications if certain parts of the file need updating and export the finished PIF to a different format to distribute to all parties that require it.
Industry Spotlight: Food
To demonstrate the utility of Aptean PLM Lascom Edition’s compliance features, let’s examine the example of a snack manufacturer trying to refine the ingredients for their new granola bar. Perhaps they at first tried a flavour profile enhanced with an assortment of dried fruits, but that wasn’t as popular in taste tests as an alternative that used peanuts in place of the fruit.
When the product designers decide to make that substitution, the change is recorded by the PLM solution, which then automatically generates a list of allergens that will require declarations—including peanuts, as they are among the most common allergens. The company can then be confident that they’ve found both the right flavour and the correct corresponding disclosures, thus mitigating the risk of non-compliance with food safety regulations.
Trust Aptean for Your PLM Needs
Now that you’ve read all about the great features of PLM solutions and how the unified database that such systems offer helps drive better NPD outcomes, you may be eager to deploy one for your food, beverage, personal care or cosmetics business. The good news is that there’s plenty of options on the market—but you’ll need to conduct some research and due diligence to discover which is best for your organisation.
Some generic, “one-size-fits-all” PLM software promises to serve manufacturers of all kinds regardless of the industry in which a customer might specialise. These “jack-of-all-trade” offerings, however, may unfortunately be masters of none, lacking the highly specialised features that a company in your specific vertical needs to be successful. Really realise that core objective.
At Aptean, we understand this reality, and that’s why our dedicated professionals have put their collective decades of industry experience into developing a PLM system that is truly tailored to the needs of food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics manufacturers. We understand the unique challenges that come with these markets and the nuances of the goods within them.
“With Aptean PLM Lascom Edition, everybody has access to the same information at the same time. We save a lot of time!”
R&D Manager, Monin
Specifically, Aptean PLM Lascom Edition is very effective in driving that single source of truth that your company needs to make faster, efficient and effective decisions in the NPD process. Accelerating your time to market, you can capture your share of the market and increase revenue. Our customer Monin, a manufacturer of gourmet flavoured syrups, sauces and more, has realised significant benefits since implementing the solution.
“With Aptean PLM Lascom Edition, we are able to make our data more reliable and work with traceable validation processes,” said one of the company’s R&D project managers. “Everybody has access to the same information, and searching is much faster, boosting our productivity.”
Aptean also offers an ecosystem of software to power your business’s digital transformation. From enterprise asset management (EAM) and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) software to an industry-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, we can provide the technology you need to succeed, all under one roof with one support team.
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