(CLP) Programs

Appleton Greene corporate training programs are all process-driven. They are used as vehicles to implement tangible business processes within clients’ organizations, together with training, support and facilitation during the use of these processes. Corporate training programs are therefore implemented over a sustainable period of time, that is to say, between 1 year (incorporating 12 monthly workshops), and 4 years (incorporating 48 monthly workshops). Your program information guide will specify how long each program takes to complete. Each monthly workshop takes 6 hours to implement and can be undertaken either on the client’s premises, an Appleton Greene serviced office, or online via the internet. This enables clients to implement each part of their business process, before moving onto the next stage of the program and enables employees to plan their study time around their current work commitments. The result is far greater program benefit, over a more sustainable period of time and a significantly improved return on investment.

Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. All (CLP) programs are implemented over a sustainable period of time, usually between 1-4 years, incorporating 12-48 monthly workshops and professional support is consistently provided during this time by qualified learning providers and where appropriate, by Accredited Consultants.

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Executive summary

Innovation Ecosystem

Today’s consumers are exposed to tons of new products. According to a Nielsen study, around 57% of recent survey participants stated that they had bought new products during their last trip to a simple grocery store. That is only in one segment. What about the whole CPG industry? How can you stand out with recurring launches of relevant new products? You need to stay top of mind for your customer through a sustainable new product roadmap.

That is easier said than done, and the pressure of recurring new product launches makes more than one team break. Leaders are overwhelmed by the complexity of aligning all the variables required for:

● Finding the golden ideas;
● Building a solid product concept;
● Developing a product that meets the cost and the production requirement while being appealing to the customer;
● Launching the product on a limited budget but still reaching the required awareness.

This entire program is known to reduce time-to-market by 20-25%, improve internal alignment and structure resources to ensure a sustainable pipeline of new products.

This program can help you build a structured new product development ecosystem that will support the short-term requirements while allocating resources to big ideas that will drive more incremental sales and make your competitors jealous.

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Solid Foundation

The program starts by building a solid foundation for the overall ecosystem. A straightforward process maps the directions and the steps that the team needs to go through. It clarifies who needs to be involved to avoid conflict and prevent rushing ahead too quickly toward execution. Decision-makers need visibility of the concept and control over when spending will happen and when new resources should be invested. Return on investment versus risk is an essential aspect of the process that supports healthy cash flow planning while simultaneously developing new products. This program will accompany the definition of governance, the decisions required, and the information needed to support them.

Building a solid foundation with a phase-gate process also supports the consumer-centricity of new products. It has been proven that a new product developed around a consumer need instead of a white space in the company’s product portfolio has a significantly more chance of success, achieving the targeted sales volume. If the product solves a real consumer problem, the consumer will adopt the new product and most likely repurchase it. The innovation team should focus on making life easier for the consumer. The customer is the expert in his reality, but the innovation team is the expert in designing solutions. Developing a relationship with the consumer and asking questions about their needs are much more significant indicators of success than having the customer test the product prototype again and again. This Innovation Ecosystem program will provide tools to support consumer-centric product development with a transparent step-by-step methodology.

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Incremental Sales

Launching new products that will drive incremental sales is exciting but renovating and updating the existing product range is also part of the innovation ecosystem. Refreshing the recipe/formula, optimizing costs, and opting for more sustainable packaging are all excellent reasons to work on your existing products. The workload of the innovation team needs to be efficiently divided between renovating existing products, looking for ways to enhance the product offer, and generating breakthrough ideas. The balance of the new product portfolio, strategy and development roadmap is another critical aspect that will be addressed in this program.

Once the planning is completed, it is time to tackle the new product concept and channel the team’s efforts through a structured framework to focus on the consumer. Testing assumptions, validating the market, understanding where the competition plays and building a unique value proposition are where the innovation team will start the actual work. With a solid new product concept on the table and a compelling business case, the strategy and the financial analysis will be presented to decision-makers before moving to product development, involving the cross-functional team or spending more dollars and allocating more resources. The business case represents the pivotal point between the theoretical product concept and the reality of its fabrication. It is also the transition between spending money on market studies and capital assets. Since it is critical to have endorsement from the executive before those investments, the business case needs to be thought through, concise with key messages, solid financial analysis, and rehearsed! As decision-makers face many presentations in a week, they must understand what is expected of them, avoid drowning themselves in tons of data and focus on the relevant information. Executive presentations are not commercial presentations, some principles need to be followed, and this program will support your team in developing the required skills for a solid Business case presentation.

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Team effort

In most companies, the challenge of too many projects and insufficient resources are recurring. This program will provide prioritization tools to communicate the most critical opportunities for the business. Decision-makers must decide when it is time to outsource, get more people on board or postpone less lucrative opportunities. Having a rationale behind the business priority also helps manage pet projects and not-so-urgent requests from sales.

This program will also address the challenge product concepts face when the manufacturing and transformation reality hits. That critical step coincides with the project’s leadership transfer from the conceptualization team to the operation team. Communication challenges may occur between the must-have to fulfill the consumer needs versus the nice-to-have that might be left off. But it also raised more opportunities to improve the product concept. The cross-functional team must meet a target timeline and negotiate to achieve the expected cost and margin.

While all efforts are invested in making the winning product concept a reality, the marketing team needs to ensure the consumer will notice it. Some companies have millions to invest into supporting a launch, others a few thousand. Start-ups are the best example of success on a tight budget: they have a refined message, clear persona, and creative way to reach it. This is what will be covered in this program: The launch strategies, objectives, and tactics, as well as key metrics, will be clearly defined to reach the largest audience.

With the established foundation, it will be time to build an innovation strategy and understand the innovation capacity versus actual needs to achieve your company’s growth goal. You were cropping numbers to understand the reality of past launches versus expectations toward future launches. Review the allocation of resources and optimize them to accelerate the development of more incremental products. After crunching the numbers, the next question is where the business wants to grow, what will be the pillars of the future roadmap for new products and what resource allocation to win at understanding your consumer. This program will dive deeply into your business capacity, expectation, and exciting future.

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Essential Skillset

Innovation in the context of manufacturing and CPG is overlooked in many aspects in the available literature or training: The IT sector captures a significant amount of attention in the subject. Beyond this entire ecosystem, some key competencies are essential to address in this program: Innovation leadership, cross-functional team management, and innovation project management. With over 20 years of experience in the industry, I will be happy to share my thoughts and wisdom to sharpen these skills and provide context to the underlying challenges that accompany innovation and manufacturing.

Finally, this program closes with the post-mortem. Like any sustainable process, it is essential to challenge what should be done to improve it and enable future projects to be tackled with an improved and adapted system. The market fluctuates, the business evolves, and the process needs to improve to represent this reality. By having a mapped, understood, experimented, and communicated process, any changes would be easier to implement.

That whole program reduces the time to market by 20%-25%, improving internal alignment and structuring resources to ensure a sustainable pipeline of new products.

If you play to win, this program will make sure you do!

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Curriculum

Innovation Ecosystem – Part 1 – Year 1

1. Part 1 Month 1 Optimal Ecosystem
2. Part 1 Month 2 Customer-centric
3. Part 1 Month 3 Phase Gate
4. Part 1 Month 4 Decision making
5. Part 1 Month 5 Governance
6. Part 1 Month 6 Product Concept
7. Part 1 Month 7 Business case
8. Part 1 Month 8 Product development
9. Part 1 Month 9 Launch Strategies
10. Part 1 Month 10 Value Proposition Canvas
11. Part 1 Month 11 Value of messaging and the product it