Consumer Products

Winning propositions in the consumer products industry can’t get to market soon enough. Product launches must also be highly predictable. Missing a market window or commitment date can have disastrous consequences. PPM is the only project management methodology available that provides both the speed and predictability benefits you need, and the tools required to ensure those benefits.

Improved Visibility: Last minute surprises are the nemesis of consumer product development. Problems surface—after launch commitments have been made—and there is a mad scramble to recover. Too often the results are lost features, poor quality, or insufficient initial supplies. The buffering system inherent in critical chain schedules provides an unprecedented early warning system. Problems are surfaced months or even years earlier, in plenty of time to take corrective actions.

Better Project Control: The buffers in a critical chain schedule not only serve to identify problems early, they provide a basis for evaluating what-if scenarios and highlighting solutions that keep the project on track for a timely launch. In addition, the team knows every week which task is driving project progress and where they can apply focused work to protect their launch date. These capabilities have allowed our clients to increase overall on-time delivery rates to over 90%

Critical Resource Identification: One common shortcoming of traditional critical path scheduling is that resource limitations are ignored. Anyone with experience in consumer product development knows that resources are not always available when needed. Even in companies that try to create dedicated project teams, key resources are matrixed to projects. Projects compete for these shared resources and traditional schedules don’t identify the resulting conflicts. PPM schedules highlight the bottlenecks and allow you to adjust delivery dates to account for the impact of resource contention within and between projects.