iNova Pharmaceuticals Powers Growth and Innovation Through Strategic Partnership

Following iNova’s acquisition of the Mundipharma Consumer Health portfolio in 2004, which resulted in significant growth in terms of geographic reach and portfolio, the global consumer health company understood that its approach to project management would not be sustainable or scalable. With substantial data and complex processes fragmented across different teams and regions, and supporting a growing product portfolio of 100+ projects, the company saw the need for centralised solution that would empower the fast-growing company to retain its speed and agility in delivering consumer health solutions around the world.

Through a strategic partnership with Planview implementation experts Hummingbird, iNova Pharmaceuticals introduced much-needed centralization and standardization to its new product development capabilities. This created a single source of truth for project and portfolio data while preserving its established innovation process.

iNova Pharmaceuticals is an established leader in new product innovation and strategy. It’s mission is to improve people’s health and well-being every day through its portfolio of trusted brands. The global company manages a diverse product portfolio of prescription medications and consumer healthcare products across Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Europe. In 2024, iNova significantly increased its innovative product portfolio with the acquisition of Mundipharma’s consumer healthcare portfolio, anchored by the iconic Betadine brand, which effectively doubled its business size.

iNova was managing a growing product portfolio primarily using disconnected systems, critically impeding its ability to effectively and centrally track product portfolio financials and resources. Project data was fragmented across multiple tools, emphasizing the need for a unified system and a single source of truth to consolidate project, commercial, and financial data.

Without a standardized solution or approach to project management, the processes to gather, analyze, and report on project scope, updates, and performance were highly manual, making them potentially subject to human errors and inconsistencies. Forecasting the effort required across all functions made it challenging to ensure the successful execution of the continuous product development pipeline and resulted in operational inefficiencies=.

iNova Pharmaceuticals recognized the need for a comprehensive solution to its product innovation development challenges. It also needed a system that would support its broader vision: empowering its newly established Global PMO with enterprise-wide Project Portfolio Management capabilities.

“We initially considered building an in-house app or intranet SharePoint site with different components stitched together, because at that point in time, we had not identified a commercially available out-of-the-box solution that was going to meet our complex needs,” said Amanda Kennedy, Group Technology Project Manager at iNova. “Ultimately, the cost and the time it would take to build internally weren’t attractive to us.”

With their financial reporting system nearing end-of-life and the recent acquisition doubling the size of their portfolio, finding a solution quickly was crucial. Kennedy turned to Gartner to perform desktop research on an off-the-shelf product for companies in their sector that would address iNova’s key business pain points.

“When we went through the vendor selection process, we looked at our pain points, and tried to find a solution that would either address those in full or as much as possible. We wanted to be able to show the actual value of the system, rather than just putting in a system for the sake of it. We wanted to fix the business’s concerns and pain points to make it a worthwhile journey for them as well.” Amanda Kennedy said.

After narrowing the selection down to three project & portfolio management (PPM) vendors, Planview Portfolios emerged as the preferred solution. The platform was the only product they reviewed that met iNova's 50+ technical requirements across both PPM and new product development. Critically, Planview also had the capability to support iNova's long-term strategy to scale an PPM solution across the enterprise.

Another key differentiator was Planview's powerful Power BI data visualization capabilities. These advanced analytics appealed to iNova product innovation leaders, who understood the feature's abilities to slice and dice data and provide valuable insights. "The integration with Power BI was the cherry on top, because at the end of the day, our team and decision makers want to see all this data in a simple graph," said David Castro Aguirre, Innovation Team.

iNova's Planview implementation was a deeply collaborative partnership between iNova's , commercial and IT teams, and Planview Portfolios' implementation partner in the APAC region, Hummingbird. Hummingbird demonstrated its deep expertise by going beyond an out-of-the-box setup to deploy a custom-configured Portfolios solution that optimized iNova's established innovation process. This included building custom API integrations to connect its Excel P&L sheets with Planview while maintaining familiar workflows.

Hummingbird also ran tailored workshops for iNova stakeholders to ease the change management aspects of platform adoption. During these sessions, they worked on adapting their traditional waterfall approach to a more iterative process that supported stakeholder decision-making during the product configuration stages.

“Hummingbird understood the business needed to see what the Portfolios screens would look like, so they were configuring things before we even signed off on the blueprints because that was the most efficient way to do it with our stakeholders. They were an amazing implementation partner,” Amanda Kennedy said.

Once they were ready, iNova executed a phased rollout of Planview, beginning with the innovation team and expanding to the Global PMO. A 90-day strategic soft launch allowed gradual user transition, ensuring a frictionless hard launch and higher adoption rates.

The implementation significantly reduced the effort around iNova’s stage-gate review process, provided executives with unprecedented portfolio visibility, and established a scalable foundation for managing hundreds of products across multiple global markets.

By implementing a unified approach to managing multiple platforms and datasets with Planview, iNova resolved critical data quality issues that stemmed from its previously fragmented system. This eliminated time-consuming manual data compilation and reporting processes and enabled better tracking of financial metrics, including net sales and gross margins.

Another key outcome was the automatic generation of gate review reports, which slashed project managers' product meeting preparation time from one week to just minutes. Streamlining the company's proven innovation governance process enabled iNova to manage its growth effectively by optimizing decision-making, automating project approvals, and improving visibility and global team collaboration.

Planview also optimized reporting and insights for executives, empowering them with complete visibility into effort, resources, and financial outcomes across the portfolio. These improvements created more confidence in financial data between segmented innovation channels. In addition, Planview's Power BI integration generated impactful data visualizations and reports, enhancing decision-making through better data access and clarity.

Building on the foundational success of implementing Planview Portfolios, iNova Pharmaceuticals is now expanding its partnership with Hummingbird to leverage more value from the Planview platform.

iNova's newly formed Global PMO will spearhead the rollout of Planview's PPM solution across the enterprise, creating a centralized source for project execution and management standards across key business functions.

Following this expansion, iNova will integrate Planview with its enterprise data platform, a step that will enable leaders to compare forecasted project costs against actuals and make more informed, data-driven decisions about capital allocation and project prioritization during stage-gate reviews.

The final stage of the roadmap is to implement Planview's Strategic Portfolio Management solution and Investment and Capacity Planning (ICP) module to equip themselves with powerful scenario analysis capabilities. This will allow leadership to optimize resource allocation during stage-gate reviews and continue to supercharge new product development growth for the company.