Bayer Launch Excellence (LEx)
AgTech - Internal Application
Situation
The Vegetable group identified an opportunity to improve the launch process of new varieties to increase its predictability and consistency in hitting launch dates. Pipeline is a long process and many activities need to start in a timely manner to be finished in time. A missed launch date means the launch of a new product might be delayed by a year or more. The business team split the effort into 4 work streams, one of them being PROCESS who performed extensive work understanding and documenting the Launch Process.
When the Business team felt they were ready to implement the process into a software system, the team reached out to their Development Leader to get estimates. The Development Team was asked to do something they were not ready to do because there was a gap in the understanding of what each team needed.
This is when they turned to the Design Studio for help gaining clarity on how to approach this problem.
task
Describe tasks
actions
By developing a deep understanding of the work of a launch team we were able to identify important obstacles to achieve the business objectives.
The first one is the lack of visibility of the status of the pipeline. Because information on the tasks associated with the pipeline is not accessible, activities could easily fall behind schedule. We created a visualization of the process that made it easy to monitor the health of the pipeline and quickly address issues.
In order to support this, a standard process needed to be developed. The Business team had laid a great foundation for a standard process and we helped simplify and define it so it could be implemented in the new system.
Finally, all of this was done by leveraging and adapting existing data and systems (e.g. P&T).
results
Feature concepts and workflows have been iterated on and vetted with end users before any code was produced thus saving tremendous amounts of resources
We were able to translate the insights on the real pain points garnered during Discovery into a solution that really addresses them
Helping bridge the gap between the business and dev teams allowed preserving the desired timeline
The value brought by the Design Studio team spoke for itself having the engagement, originally slated for 3 months, renewed 3 times
A high degree degree of confidence that the solution that was collaboratively developed will be instrumental in achieving the business objectives of full realizing the ROI of new vegetable launches with a standardized and transparent process