Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Specialty Chemicals Company Streamlines Product Development with Web-based Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Chemicals
Customer Profile
With annual sales topping U.S.$6.4 billion in 2003, Rohm and Haas develops specialty chemicals for a wide range of customer industries. Rohm and Haas employs 17,000 people globally.
Business Situation
Rohm and Haas needed to automate its Stage Gate research and development process and provide a more collaborative work environment for its globally dispersed workforce.
Solution
To help manage and automate the Stage Gate product development process, Rohm and Haas implemented InnovateEX for Stage Gate Product Development—built on the Microsoft® Office System.
Benefits
n Reduced administrative preparation
n Lowered total cost of ownership
n Improved team collaboration
n Helped reduce product cycle-times / “This [solution] helps us make sure we’re covering all of the major risks associated with each project, which in turn helps us get products out the door more quickly.”
Dr. Mary Burch, Research and Development Director, Architectural and Functional Coatings Research, Rohm and Haas
Specialty chemicals company Rohm and Haas develops such technically advanced products as coatings, sealants, adhesives, and performance chemicals. Rohm and Haas’s Architectural and Functional Coatings business unit uses the proven Stage Gate process to help manage its product research and development, but with up to 75 projects in its portfolio at one time, the paper-based system meant manually extracting data from documents in order to assess its large portfolio. In order to help automate this time-consuming process, Rohm and Haas implemented InnovateEX for Stage Gate Product Development from Microsoft partner QualiSci—built on Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003, Rohm and Haas’s Architectural and Functional Coatings business unit now enjoys better team collaboration, improved information access, and reduced new product development cycle times across the globe.
Situation
Rohm and Haas is a specialty chemicals company with 17,000 employees and over 100 worldwide manufacturing sites focused on delivering technically advanced products to customers in over 100 countries. With 2003 sales topping U.S.$6.4 billion, it creates adhesives, sealants, coatings, electronic materials, monomers, performance chemicals, and salts for such markets as building products, personal care, consumer electronics, transportation, paper and packaging, pharmaceuticals, construction, and computer hardware.
The Architectural and Functional Coatings business unit is Rohm and Haas’s largest business unit with over 3,000 employees and sales nearing U.S.$2 billion annually. Its customers require the Architectural and Functional Coatings business unit to develop a wide spectrum of products—from industrial applications, like paint for bridges; to products for graphic arts applications, like ink or digital imaging products; to consumer applications, like decorative paints. In a business unit the size of Architectural and Functional Coatings, up to 140 individual projects in research and development and sales directed projects can make up a portfolio, a sizeable undertaking for the research and development (R&D) team.
Rohm and Haas’s Architectural and Functional Coatings business unit uses the Stage Gate process to help manage its product development. Stage Gate is a process for increasing throughput for product development by moving projects through review “gates” that provide management with regular opportunities to evaluate whether a project should continue to the next stage.
Throughout development, each project moves through five or six “gates,” and at each stage, a three-to-five page gate document is produced, starting with the concept plan (Gate 1) of the product all the way through to a commercialization plan (Gate 6).
This process at Rohm and Haas was a completely manual, paper-based process. Gate documents were created in Microsoft® Office Word 2003, sent as e-mail attachments to appropriate people, printed, and stored in a large file cabinet. In addition, a Microsoft Office Excel 2003 spreadsheet was included with every gate document, providing discounted cash flow analyses for each project. Project leaders had to manually copy data from gate documents and enter that data into the spreadsheet at each stage, providing net present value and other metrics for each project. This paper-based process introduced the possibility of error, it was potentially expensive, and it prevented users from accessing other data sources. From a managerial standpoint, it reduced the predictability of determining when a project would clear a particular gate.
What’s more, every six months, the Coatings Research division reviewed its entire portfolio to analyze whether the portfolio served strategic business interests. “Trying to manually manage a portfolio with up to 75 projects using printed documents and file cabinets was difficult,” says Dr. Mary Burch, R&D Director of Architectural and Functional Coatings Research at Rohm and Haas. “Reviewing and analyzing an entire portfolio is necessary, but as it was, very labor-intensive.”
Solution
Rohm and Haas needed a solution that would help manage the product development process and eliminate the manual, paper-based processes while providing a collaboration environment for globally dispersed project teams.
“We realized that it would be beneficial to have a system that would not only give us a place to manage and store our gate documents, but that would also allow us to automate our portfolio analysis, especially with our larger portfolios,” explains Burch.
To help automate and manage its product development process, Rohm and Haas teamed up with Microsoft partner QualiSci, a provider of product development and commercialization solutions, to implement a Web-based solution built on the Microsoft Office System programs and technologies—InnovateEX for Stage Gate Product Development.
How It Works
Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 documents can be much more than repositories of user-entered information, they can be programmed to be "smart.” Smart documents can be programmed to pre-populate data automatically, making it easier for information workers to fill in forms, or work with templates. InnovateEX takes advantage of these smart documents to help ensure R&D documents are always up-to-date and consistent.
Smart documents gain their power from XML—an industry-standard language that describes the visual appearance and meaning of data. With XML, QualiSci created tags to describe what data means, and how it should look when displayed.
InnovateEX is built on these XML-supported Microsoft Office System smart documents, including Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office Excel 2003, that model the Stage Gate process for product development. With these XML-supported smart documents, users can easily incorporate data from other documents, programs, and data sources into a document and more quickly move it on in the R&D process to the next required gate. What’s more, now, when a team member opens an Office Word 2003 document, the most up-to-date data available immediately populates the document, helping ensure consistency and accuracy throughout the R&D process.
With Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services, and Web parts, Architectural and Functional Coatings R&D team members can access templates, capture and store project information, and view data. Project workspaces can be used to collaborate and exchange information on portfolio analysis and other documents. Information Rights Management technology safeguards each document, so that only authorized users can edit team documents or make decisions on stage approvals. In addition, Microsoft Office Project 2003 helps the team manage projects and schedules and tracks resources.
Solution Architecture
InnovateEX for Stage Gate Product Development uses Microsoft Internet Explorer as the Web-based front end and Office Word 2003 and Office Excel 2003 as the primary user productivity tools and interface. The solution runs on the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system with Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000 as the back-end database store for Stage Gate and portfolio management data. Data is captured using XML-supported smart documents and is displayed using Web parts.
Benefits
As a result of InnovateEX for Stage Gate Product Development, Rohm and Haas enjoys improved real-time information access and automated new product development processes that enable quicker, better decision-making, the ability to collaborate across dispersed project groups, and reduced product cycle times.
Reduced Administration Preparation—from Days to Hours
Prior to implementing InnovateEX, preparing a portfolio for analysis was a manual, arduous process, taking an executive manager and an assistant several days to extract data from each gate document. Now, with XML-based smart documents that capture data, portfolio analysis can be completed in matter of hours. “InnovateEX enables us to take a whole array of projects and transform that into an entire portfolio analysis—and it’s as simple as pushing a button,” says Burch.
By automating its portfolio analysis process, Rohm and Haas can quickly take a snapshot of what a portfolio looks like and compare it to long-term strategic intent. With easy access to real-time critical business data, project leaders and executive managers can more easily make better, quicker decisions about whether to continue or reject projects earlier in the product development process. Because the process took valuable time, Rohm and Haas only ran its portfolio analysis twice a year. Now, management can run a portfolio analysis anytime. “At any point, we can run an analysis and determine whether the portfolio is serving the needs of the business,” explains Burch.
Offered Lower Total Cost of Ownership
By building on existing Microsoft technologies, such as the Microsoft Office System programs, InnovateEX offers a lower total cost of ownership. Employees can work with the Word 2003 and Excel 2003 documents they are already familiar with, helping to maximize productivity with little training. And with ease of deployment, Rohm and Haas used very few of its own IT resources to implement InnovateEX. “QualiSci made such a good product that we required very few IT resources to implement InnovateEX,” explains Burch.
Improved Team Collaboration
As a global research company, Rohm and Haas often has project teams dispersed around the world researching and developing products. Prior to implementing InnovateEX, one of the biggest challenges the company faced in terms of its process was maintaining version control of gate documents. Now, with the information sharing and collaboration features of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services, team collaboration, and version control have never been easier at Rohm and Haas.
Project team members can check out gate documents from a SharePoint site containing a document library, make any needed changes, and then check the document back into the document library. This process allows team members to maintain a comprehensive record of document changes using the Version History feature in Windows SharePoint Services. Employees no longer have to wonder if they’re working on the latest document version or whether their changes will be seen by other team members. Now, entire project teams can collaborate and share ideas on each gate document while still maintaining tight version control.
What’s more, with document check-in and check-out capabilities, employees working in remote locations with limited Internet connections can easily work offline. “This is one of the most attractive features for us,” explains Patricia Bruce, Process Analyst at Rohm and Haas, “because it fits our needs as a global research company.”
Helped Reduce Product Cycle-Times
As a best-in-class implementer of the Stage Gate process, Rohm and Haas realizes that one of the most critical aspects of reducing product cycle-times in research and development is to focus on fewer projects and get those products to commercialization more quickly. InnovateEX helps Rohm and Haas do that by making uniform how the company approaches each stage through the product development process and by making easier the ability to assess its entire portfolio. By carefully monitoring the Research Portfolio of projects and the resources associated with them, the Architectural and Functional Coatings business has been able to cut the new product development time in half.
Now, there is a smart document for each research and development stage from concept to commercialization and each person on a project team uses the same document to share information. “It helps promote consistent critical thinking because the templates ask the same questions of every project team,” says Burch, “and this helps us make sure we’re covering all of the major risks associated with each project, which in turn helps us get products out the door more quickly.”
The Microsoft Office System
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