Industrial Automation Leader Innovates Idea to Production Process

Overview

An industrial automation global leader implemented a cross-company standardized product development process. The process utilizes an idea to production checklist to manage which project deliverables are needed for various types of projects. Previously, the checklist was managed in Excel and associates various deliverables across the multiple phases of project implementation. For the project to continue to move through the phases, milestone reviews were performed. During these reviews, each business unit needed to prove all deliverables were completed before receiving funding and moving forward.

Key Challenges

Project managers were responsible to manipulate Excel templates to determine what project deliverables needed to be completed. There were hundreds of potential deliverables listed for every project, whether they were pertinent or not to that specific project. Project managers were managing multiple projects with massive spreadsheets. The idea to production process was cumbersome and contained inaccurate data. Additionally, visibility into the project’s phases continued to be a roadblock and organization-wide reporting was not possible.

Deliverable approval was managed in SAP using an inflexible SAP workflow. This process was highly manual and provided no visibility into the status of approvals. Similarly, it was cumbersome to add or replace approvers once the workflow was started, resulting in multiple email follow-ups. The SAP system was not flexible enough to keep up with changing business requirement on how to route documents for approval. Furthermore, storing the approved deliverables in SAP was a challenge due to each type of deliverables data requirements. This manual process continued to cause inefficiencies due to: