This article appeared in the OCT NOV DEC 2014 issue
of insiderPROFILES (insiderPROFILESonline.com)
and appears here with permission from WIS PUBLISHING.
Delivering
Products to
Customers
Faster
How Rich Products Is Improving
Product Development Processes with a
Speed-to-Market Initiative and SAP PLM
26
OCT NOV DEC 2014
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by Lauren Bonneau, Managing Editor
R
ich Products Corporation, a family-owned
frozen food manufacturer and solutions provider based in Buffalo, New York, has its sights
set on long-term global competitiveness. The
company recognizes that to continue to meet customer
expectations and win new business, it has to improve its
ability to identify new product opportunities and deliver
products to market faster.
“We place a high value on our customers and treat them
like family,” says Gary Klosko, IT Program Manager for Rich
Products. “Our business has been successful for a long time,
but there’s never room for complacency. A big mission right
now is building an even deeper relationship with our customers, along with a focus on improving speed, becoming
more efficient, reducing costs, and continuing to innovate
with new products.”
After conducting a cross-functional survey to assess its
existing processes thoroughly, Rich Products determined
that to achieve its goals, a comprehensive redesign of its
overall product development process was required. Toward
that end, the company undertook a “Speed-to-Market”
(STM) initiative with the aim of optimizing processes and
improving workflows, which would in turn increase user
productivity and reduce compliance risk.
Klosko’s role at Rich Products is to work with the business to architect technology and process solutions that will
enable capabilities necessary to meet its business strategies
— specifically for larger business programs that have the
potential to transform the way work gets done, such as STM.
“From a business and IT perspective, an optimized common
product development process could have a dramatic impact
on the business with reduced cycle time, lower process costs,
increased revenue from new product development, and
with products delivered to the customer faster,” he says.
Developing a Proof of Concept
To carry out the STM initiative, Rich Products needed a
product lifecycle management (PLM) technology solution
to enable the redesigned process — a solution that was
capable of supporting the company’s extensive product
development and innovation requirements. After careful
consideration — including attending conferences, talking to
experts, hearing customer references, and witnessing demos
— the company chose SAP Product Lifecycle Management
(SAP PLM) (specifically for the recipe development and specification functionality, and the tight integration with SAP
ERP to enable its transformed product development and data
management processes).
To demonstrate to executive leadership how the technical solution would benefit the entire business, a team of
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At a Glance
Goal: Deliver innovative products to customers faster,
while becoming more efficient and reducing costs
Strategy: Redesign product development processes
and implement the recipe development functionality of
SAP PLM
Outcome: Anticipated reduction in cycle time,
increased revenue from new product development,
faster product delivery, system integration that
provides real-time information to users, and workflow
enhancements that improve user productivity and
mitigate compliance issues
information systems and business process associates executed a
proof of concept (PoC). In addition to IT members, the PoC team
included associates from the various functional areas the application would touch at the company’s headquarters and across its
five regional business locations.
After extensive collaboration, the team identified six main
objectives for the PoC:
• Learn the software functionality and configuration requirements
• Identify and assess any gaps in the functionality
• Understand how the technology will affect existing processes
and identify opportunities for improvement
• Identify data migration and system interface requirements
• Understand technical infrastructure and implementation impacts
• Assess organizational change impacts
“As we evaluated the implementation together, we assessed
how big it would be, what effort would be involved, what we
would have to learn, and how we would build the plan going
forward. It was a chance to get the business more engaged with
the product; understanding it, becoming more comfortable with
it, and wanting it,” says Klosko.
Over the course of five months, the PoC team assessed the
technical solution based on these objectives. “We found a few
gaps,” says Klosko. “But our position was that we would prefer to
spend the time to close those gaps rather than purchase something else and deal with the integration. We knew we could
make it work. More importantly, the PoC confirmed our belief
that to gain significant improvements, we could not simply swap
technology solutions but had to transform our work processes.”
The team then presented the assessment based on the PoC to
Rich Products’ senior executives, who agreed that the proposed
solution and approach were the right ones for the company.
“Once we finalized the PoC, the process transformation project
began in earnest and ran in parallel with the system replacement,” says Klosko. “At that point, we started transitioning the
project ownership more from IT to the business, especially on
28
OCT NOV DEC 2014
the process side — defining the process, making sure the system
is enabling the process, and keeping an eye out that the most
optimal solution is being built for the process.”
Why SAP PLM?
According to Klosko, who was involved in the evaluation and
selection of the technical solution, Rich Products chose SAP PLM
to drive its STM initiative for four main reasons:
1.It builds on the SAP ERP platform the company already has in
place
2.It provides critical integration from product development to
the plant floor
3.It offers better capabilities than the company’s existing PLM
system
4.Its specifications functionality supports an in-flight product
quality initiative providing a common database and process for managing specifications focused on the customer’s
requirements
It was clear the legacy PLM system the company was using was
outdated, and as a stand-alone application, there was no native
integration with the company’s existing SAP solution landscape
— which included SAP ERP, SAP Supply Chain Management
(SAP SCM), and SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) — and the
system did not provide real-time information to users. It was
common to have various handoffs from the legacy system to the
SAP ERP system, where different people had to re-enter the same
information before the product could be launched.
“From an IT perspective, we knew the legacy PLM system
needed to be replaced because the version we were on was no
longer supported. Additionally, the system, along with the current
process, wasn’t universally accepted by our user community. When
looking for a replacement, we dug into SAP PLM and valued the
integration we saw there. As an SAP shop, it made sense to us,”
says Klosko. “If we chose something non-SAP, we would have had
to integrate it ourselves and end up with the same challenges
we have with our legacy system. An integrated system would
streamline our processes and get us to market faster.”
“With proximity enabling verbal
communication, many handoffs that
occurred in the past can be eliminated
or done much faster, there are fewer
workflow lags, and tasks don’t sit in
queues. Moving to that concept is
transformational for us and is key to
getting products to market faster.”
—Gary Klosko, IT Program Manager,
Rich Products
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To help simplify its product development process, Rich Products
created “natural work teams,” which are groups of people
from different functional areas that focus on collaborating to
develop products for a particular product category
Now, with the recipe development functionality in SAP PLM,
the finished product and all its components (recipes, formulas,
ingredients, packaging, specifications, and nutritional and labeling
information) are linked together within SAP ERP. That integrated
data is the same data that is used for managing the supply chain.
Information feeds all the way down to the bill of materials on the
shop floor, providing a tighter integration between the R&D and
Production departments.
And the benefits of SAP PLM weren’t limited to its integration
capabilities. The enhanced workflow capabilities helped enable the
redesigned product development process.
Workflow Improvements
With a strong focus on innovation and more than 2,000 products
produced in 34 manufacturing facilities worldwide, new product development or product change projects are constantly being launched.
The continuous barrage of projects can be overwhelming and easily
distracting to those working on them. When moving between projects, people naturally lose efficiency as they try to remember exactly
where they left off with each one, what they were doing, and what
they were thinking. As part of the STM initiative, Rich Products
wanted to simplify its product development process and reduce
or eliminate some steps in the workflow to help improve user
productivity, deliver products faster, and reduce compliance risk.
To help achieve these goals, the company created something called
“natural work teams” — groups of people from different functional
areas that are involved in the product development process for a
particular product category, such as bakery, pizza, and so on. “This
is where the process transformation work really comes into play,”
says Klosko. “Imagine co-locating R&D developers in a room with a
project manager, some process managers, and packaging associates,
and all they do is work on bakery projects together. These groups
of people are independent units that control their own work and
resources, communicate, follow through, and get the work done
faster. With proximity enabling verbal communication, many handoffs that occurred in the past can be eliminated or done much faster,
there are fewer workflow lags, and tasks don’t sit in queues. Moving
to that concept is transformational for us and is key to getting
products to market faster.”
The new SAP PLM functionality also contributed to the workflow
and efficiency improvements. The overall project workflow to commercialize a new product involves multiple steps executed by up to
seven different functional areas. Some of these areas are involved at
multiple points in the process, with some of the points being simply to
recheck work done by previous groups. If anything was found wrong
with the data or if changes needed to be made at any point, the process essentially had to start over again from the beginning. With the
SAP workflow capabilities, that is no longer the case. “Now we can go
back to a selectable point in the workflow,” says Klosko. “If regulatory
sees something wrong, it will go back to the point in the workflow
where the corrections need to be made, rather than going back to
the first step. This advancement makes us much faster and more efficient. We also eliminated the non-value-added steps through internal
process change and, where possible, through system automation.”
Data Migration Efforts
According to Klosko, the data migration and cleansing piece of implementing a new solution can be a complicated and time-consuming
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The new Innovation Center features a Customer Solution Studio where culinarians join
sales and marketing teams to present products and foodservice solutions to customers
effort. His recommendation is to start early, and from the outset, the
project team at Rich Products had one person whose sole responsibility during the STM initiative was focused on the data. The team
spent a long time considering the data migration to SAP PLM —
thinking about what to migrate, how to migrate it, and what needed
to be cleansed.
While recipe development doesn’t involve a transactional environment that operates the day-to-day activities of the company,
like managing sales orders or inventory, the data involved is crucial
information for developing products. “With transactional systems,
any type of glitch at all can mean an order is not getting shipped or
something is delayed. Recipe development isn’t as immediate, but
the data is absolutely critical because it is the source for the label
and ultimately defines what our customers want,” says Klosko. “Our
product specification data was scattered in our legacy PLM system,
departmental databases, and in various documents across multiple
file systems. We didn’t have much consistency among the product categories, and a lot of that data was in documents and other
unstructured sources. You need to get that data right for everything
in your system to work smoothly and efficiently.”
The effort to cleanse the data and map it to SAP PLM was a
challenge, but one that the team did not shy away from. “The specification database in recipe development is a powerful dynamic
structure that can be configured to meet your needs,” Klosko says.
“But until you have it defined, it’s hard to map that data. A lot of
effort went into this data migration, and we are certainly pleased
with the state and quality of our data today.”
Learning the New System
The last hurdle was getting people to understand the new system
and the changes it would bring. “The PoC process was educational
for both IT and the business,” Klosko says. “It provided a good indication of the learning curve our associates would need to go through
as we transitioned to a more contemporary technology platform.
People had been using our existing system for almost 15 years. They
were familiar with that system and knew their product, formula,
ingredient, and packaging codes by heart,” Klosko says. “With the
SAP system, the specification number is key as it uniquely defines
each object and is used as a primary method to navigate the system.
Our associates had a difficult time with this and we quickly learned
that the architectural differences from our legacy system alone
would take some effort to get through.”
To get over this hurdle and keep the PoC on track, the team persisted in communicating the benefits of the new system and by
mapping the data architecture of the legacy system to recipe development in the SAP system. And, by focusing on the advances in search
capabilities and performing some minor custom development, the
team was able to bridge the two user experiences and streamline the
transition. “The data our associates were looking for is all still there;
30
OCT NOV DEC 2014
Company Snapshot
Rich Products
Headquarters: Buffalo, New York
Industry: Frozen food manufacturing
Sales: $3.3 billion
Employees: 9,200+
Company details:
•Family-owned since 1945 when Robert E. Rich founded the
company with Rich’s Whip Topping
•Known worldwide as the founder of the non-dairy segment of the
frozen food industry and a leading supplier and solutions provider
to the foodservice, in-store bakery, and retail marketplaces
•More than 2,000 products across 20 product categories are sold
in 112 countries, with 34 manufacturing facilities worldwide
•Well-known brands include Bettercreme, Carvel, Farm Rich,
Niagara Farms, f’real, Jon Donaire, Byron’s BBQ, Casa di
Bertacchi, and SeaPak
SAP solutions:
•SAP ERP (specifically for the order, inventory, and warehouse
management, production, procurement, and finance functionality)
•SAP PLM (specifically for the recipe development functionality and
specifications)
•SAP SCM
•SAP BW
they just didn’t realize it right away,” he says. “We simply put forth a
little effort to modify the system to make some data elements more
visible and easier for users to be comfortable with, and it worked.”
Implementation Update
Based on the PoC, the first phase of the implementation was
completed for a category of plants in the US and will serve as the
foundation for a global rollout at all of Rich Products’ manufacturing facilities. The second phase is underway for the remainder of its
plants in the US and Canada, and phase three will involve the plants
in international regions.
As of this writing, although it is still too early to assess the impact
of the initial implementation, the project team learned that making
significant process and system changes at the same time was proving to be very challenging to end users. “For the second phase of the
implementation, we subsequently offset the system from the process implementation by two months to ease into the change,” says
Klosko. “This time will allow our associates to get familiar with the
new process and adjust to their new roles prior to introducing the
system change. Since the new process does not fully align with the
old system, a little extra work may be required, but we felt it was necessary to lessen the impact of the change especially with the second
phase being much larger than the first.”
Rich Products knows that more challenges are still out there lurking on the horizon. But, the business feels it has made enormous
strides and is on the right track to efficiently deliver innovative
products to market faster.
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