Managing Automation - September 2007 - (Page 39)

That’s where Mingus, in his role as global director of product development, came in. He was charged with increasing the amount of revenue Glatfelter could generate from new products, not to mention reducing the time required to bring products to market. He was also committed to reducing the number of products submitted to development that ultimately never made their way to market or failed their revenue and profit objectives because they were ill-defined or ill-conceived. The only way to accomplish all of the goals, Mingus believed, was to develop common NPD processes and automate the practice. The company tapped Sopheon’s Accolade PLM system in 2002 as the enabling technology platform for the “A” piece of CLEAR. Its best practice, central repository, and dashboard and reporting capabilities, among other features, provided just the right level of automation and shared information access required to bring standardization to the Glatfelter divisions’ NPD processes, Mingus says. Accolade serves as the central portal for all data and activities needed to move product development projects through the system. The software automatically populates charts and creates reports that help executives make better decisions related to project selection and prioritization, he says. “Accolade helped people focus on the projects, the deliverables, the milestones, and the methodology of getting to results,” he says. “As we added new people in new product development, we wanted to archive the work they and others were doing. We didn’t have a good method corporate-wide to capture what happened in NPD projects. With Accolade, we now have it.” In addition to deploying Accolade, Glatfelter made organizational changes. It staffed up its NPD team, which now includes some 20 people exclusively focused on the practice. It also had to reorient its workforce, which traditionally had been trained to focus on long runs of relatively few grades of paper, to being comfortable with frequent changes, shorter runs, and familiarity with thousands of paper grades. And “We needed to make the company deployed an SAP ERP system as well as myriad hardware and milling changes. [new product develop“It was a tremendous change for a comment] a business funcpany not used to making changes,” he retion, not a technical calls. “We went from several hundred grades function,” says Scott of paper to several thousand just as many Mingus, Glatfelter’s companies in our sector were streamlining global director of prodtheir grade offerings and reducing the comuct development. plexity of what they do.” A couple of years into the transformation, Glatfelter is seeing significant results. The company has achieved a 25% reduction in the average time required to deliver a new product to market, along with a 55% decrease in the number of product failures, Mingus says. One of the key targets of the CLEAR initiative was to ensure that 50% of Glatfelter’s corporate revenue would come from new products by 2006. The company met that goal two years ahead of schedule, in 2004, he added. In fact, Glatfelter generated more than $500 million in sales from new products in 2006, out of total sales of nearly $1 billion. Of those sales, $200 million was derived from markets in which Glatfelter didn’t even participate in 2001. managingautomation.com As a result of this transformation, RELATED ARTICLES: Glatfelter is in a far better place to Spurring Manufacturing Innovation compete in a global and changing (Turning Up the Juice) market. Says Mingus: “The NPD www.managingautomation.com/innovation6 shift has made us better positioned Clayton Christensen on Business Model to weather any downturns. We’re Innovation one of the largest employers in the www.managingautomation.com/innovation2 county and we’re among the last Innovation: The Process Is Fundamental bastions of major-league paper makwww.managingautomation.com/innovation4 ers in Pennsylvania.” ■ maonline Photo: John Troha/ReduxPlus September 2007 39 http://managingautomation.com http://www.managingautomation.com/innovation6 http://www.managingautomation.com/innovation2 http://www.managingautomation.com/innovation4

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Managing Automation - September 2007

Contents Take 1 Europe’s Automation Chiefs Upbeat on ’08 Business Prospects Vendor Coalition Pushes Human Element of SOA Wireless: Users Still Approaching with Caution One Year Later, IBM Shows Plan for MRO’s Maximo Study: More Work Needed to Lure Next-Gen Talent Executive Q&A Notes Cover Story: 2008 Companies to Watch Special Report: The 2007 Progressive Manufacturing High Achievers Progressive Manufacturer of the Year Business Model Mastery Innovation Mastery Customer Mastery Supply Network Mastery Data & Integration Mastery Education & Training Mastery Operational Excellence Mastery Leadership Mastery Transformation: Orchestrating the Multi-Tier Supply Network Integration: The Timeless Quest for Accurate Data Industries: Maintenance No Longer on Schedule Product Scan Advertiser Index Next

Managing Automation - September 2007

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