6 Product Portfolio Management Case Study Examples

Once product organizations realize the necessity of digital transformation, the momentum to move away from limited traditional product portfolio management workflows towards more adaptive approaches becomes stronger. The movement becomes even more critical as pressures mount from executives and competitors to reduce cycle time, speed up production and project timelines, and grow innovation rapidly to establish dominance in saturated markets.

As you will see in the following product portfolio management case studies, embracing a more flexible approach to product portfolio management has been shown to mitigate the impact of disruptions and accelerate innovation. The six case studies outlined in this article offer examples of how organizations from various industries were able to create more visibility, drive efficiency and deliver clear ROI by shifting their approach to product portfolio management.

Product Portfolio Management Case Study Overview: Conagra Brands

Industry: Consumer packaged goods and food processing

The consumer packaged goods industry has exploded in size over the last few years, and the sudden competition put Conagra Brands in a challenging spot. Confronted by trends in digital transformation, they needed to remain competitive in a fast-moving marketplace. Leadership and product development team members had a healthy backlog of ideas but needed more time to test and implement them.

As a global organization with over 16,000 employees, Conagra deals with a wide variety of products across different portfolios and teams. They needed a solution that would enable their many portfolio managers to guide product teams efficiently and confidently through an intense commercialization process and consistently deliver innovations to a quickly evolving market. At that time, the teams and the data needed to collaborate best were decentralized, making it impossible to work together effectively.

“Operating in such a siloed environment led to a lack of visibility, excessive meetings that reduced productivity, and disjointed conversations happening outside the context of specific projects,” says Mark Evans, VP of R&D Product Readiness at Conagra Brands.

Conagra had an existing product portfolio management solution, but it mainly served as a tool for financial analysis. Portfolio managers had to use multiple tools across multiple platforms — for various products and portfolios — and they could never get a complete sense of bandwidth, progress, and team communications.

The Conagra Solution

In their search to improve visibility, enhance collaboration, and increase speed to market, Conagra selected Planview as their product portfolio management solution. Its ability to provide stakeholders from any team in the company with a direct line of sight for every product, from strategy to delivery, was a crucial game changer.

“Value can be measured in a lot of different ways,” says Evans. “We want it to be about executing work, innovating products, and renovating our portfolio. Having a dashboard that’s objective and based in reality – that’s tremendously exciting!”

Conagra Brands could now actively and thoroughly engage with teams from across the globe so that no team felt siloed from others. Their 16,000 employees, 5,000 ingredients, and 20,000 packaging materials were all connected in one place.

Product Portfolio Management Case Study Overview: NuVasive

Industry: Medical device manufacturing

With more than 25 locations worldwide and nearly 3,000 employees, NuVasive was intimately familiar with the difficulties of balancing too many projects at once without insight into resource capacity and incoming demand.

Product development for medical devices, on average, involves 15 cross-functional groups of people across the globe, tied together with various interdependencies and moving parts. Unfortunately, these workflows were siloed from each other and in different platforms and portfolio management solutions.

There was no way to see all products, resources, or team bandwidths in one view without hundreds of manual hours consolidating resource capacity data.

The NuVasive Solution

To solve their problem, NuVasive’s R&D Project Management Office (PMO) began using Planview to manage new product development. Planview helped their team organize collaborative, cross-functional work at the team level. By creating individual Kanban task cards, they could assign work to the appropriate cross-functional team members with little effort, giving them more insights into capacity.

Visibility into resource capacity was further enhanced by combining the Planview platform with the data sophistication of Microsoft Power BI. With this integration, NuVasive’s R&D PMO team can pull relevant data from Planview into Power BI and create custom reports and dashboards detailing the current projects. This allows them to identify where there may be bandwidth to begin new work and where they need to reprioritize existing work.

“We can do so much with our integrated solution. For example, through the application of labels and tags, we are able to better understand the cross-functional demand placed on our projects over time, overlaying trend lines to see if we need to hire more staff,” says Travis Dickerson, project manager at NuVasive. “We now have increased visibility into when specific project resources will be required, allowing us to plan for future constraints, such as holidays or personnel departures… I couldn’t ask for a better solution.”

Using Planview with Microsoft Power BI, guesswork no longer plays a role in NuVasive resource capacity management. They can gather accurate intelligence on their team’s capacity in a single location, enabling them to make better decisions on workload balancing, drive team efficiency, and reduce burnout.

Product Portfolio Management Case Study Overview: Siemens Energy

Industry: Renewable energy

A multinational organization and pioneer in renewable energy, Siemens Energy works on projects across oil, gas, heat generation, power generation, thermal power plants, and more — all with very different demands on resources and budgets.

A diverse range of products and projects in their portfolio requires Siemens Energy to adapt to a wide range of client needs. The immense scale could be taxing to manage, especially if teams were siloed from each other and used different processes to execute work. Individual portfolio managers spent too much of their day tracking information down, and what should have been simple updates were taking entire days to complete.

These inefficiencies were costing Siemens Energy money and creating a significant backlog.

“When we looked at our operations landscape, we found that everybody had different databases, spreadsheets, and tools for project management. A customer would ask us for updates, and providing an answer quickly was quite difficult,” says Andy Watson, Director of Digital Operations at Siemens Energy.

The Siemens Energy Solution

To reverse a disjointed landscape that developed from using so many disparate systems, Siemens Energy launched an initiative they dubbed “OnePM.” The initiative aimed to standardize processes and consolidate all client operations into a single platform. Through this streamlining, they would have a single, enterprise-wide hub for collecting and recording product and project data.

To increase visibility at every level and improve the productivity of individual project managers across teams, Planview AdaptiveWork provided Siemens Energy with a perfect solution.

“[A lack of a centralized hub was] one of the gaps we closed by obtaining a single platform across the business. All that information is in one place, and it is now our source of truth,” says Watson.

Siemens Energy consolidated an average of 5 systems per department and an estimated 2 million Euros in cost savings by using Planview AdaptiveWork as a critical support structure for the OnePM initiative.

Product Portfolio Management Case Study Overview: Xtrac

Industry: Automotive

Xtrac serves the fast-moving motorsport and high-performance auto industry. Their team often needs to move just as fast, balancing in-person customer support with a strenuous travel schedule to racing events held across the globe. There was just one problem: the on-the-go nature of their work didn’t mesh well with a product portfolio management solution with somewhat restrictive online accessibility.

Sharing up-to-date information was impossible on the road, and providing the team in the office with real-time changes or updates took too much effort.

“We had completely separate systems. We were using standard Microsoft tools for project management, and everything had to be put into a PDF format. Employees who provide race support at the track working remotely had to print all their documents out days before meeting a customer. This was an inefficient way of working as it meant information was often out-of-date,” says Phil Smith, project analyst at Xtrac.

Plus, senior leadership lacked confidence in project valuations because the information was often out-of-date and inaccurate. Lack of oversight, limited collaboration, and unreliable data weighed down the department.

The Xtrac Solution

After realizing they needed to update their systems and move to a more connected way of working, the project management team at Xtrac decided Planview’s cloud-based product portfolio management solution checked all the boxes.

Most importantly, it enabled them to easily edit and share product information in real-time, no matter where they were across the globe. Planview also gave Xtrac greater flexibility in managing work and customer requests with enhanced visibility and reporting capabilities better aligned to the needs of a widespread workforce.

“It was taking my boss nearly a full day to prepare for some meetings — now it is done in minutes,” says Smith.

Now, over 125 users have access to the same project data, dramatically increasing productivity and efficiency. Time delays and additional costs were significantly reduced. Xtrac’s global team can now meet customer needs with incredible speed and efficiency as quick access to accurate product data offsite no longer presents a barrier.

Product Portfolio Management Case Study Overview: Life Sciences Org

Industry: Life Sciences

Most sectors in the life sciences industry are heavily regulated, and the products are vastly complex, which leads to long development cycles; at this organization, it was no different. While preparing for a merger between its vaccine and pharmaceutical departments, this leading life sciences organization realized it would also need to consolidate disparate portfolio management systems, multiple spreadsheets, and temporary workarounds.

Cross-functional teams within the organization needed real-time data for governance and portfolio reviews. But with different systems that didn’t talk to each other, streamlining that flow of information was easier said than done.

“We didn’t have a single solution to produce all the visuals for these meetings, and with spreadsheets and all those workarounds, we were spending a huge amount of time every month just crunching data, reviewing everything, and making necessary corrections in spreadsheets and presentations,” says the Portfolio Data Science Manager for the pharmaceuticals company’s vaccine division.

It became evident that the company would need to find a solution that would help them overcome these barriers and create a centralized hub for all of their essential data and information. The democratization of data was a vital need as well, so any member of the organization could access the same data to make informed decisions.

The Solution

The cloud-based portfolio prioritization and analysis solution from Planview was the right fit for supporting the centralization and collaboration each team needed. Cross-functional teams are empowered to review financial data, advanced analytics, and reporting across all divisions in one place. This new level of access significantly reduces the time it takes for project and data managers to put together presentations for governance and portfolio reviews.

“Planview Advisor has brought a positive cultural change to the organization. We have much more discipline, quality, and accountability for our governance and portfolio reviews and more engagement from the people involved,” says the Portfolio Data Science Manager.

Finally, all the data inputs and processes can be reviewed and managed from a single source, no matter where the employee is globally or what they need to look up. Meeting preparation time has been reduced by 75% — from four days to just one. The merger between the vaccine and pharmaceutical departments was much smoother and more comprehensive after Planview was implemented.

Product Portfolio Management Case Study Overview: Viessmann Group

Industry: Heating and cooling services

The Viessmann Group is made up of numerous companies that supply sustainable air conditioning and renewable energy solutions to customers around the world. Due to the sheer number of Viessmann solutions, managing transparency between various divisions took much work. Project resourcing and staffing were nearly impossible because of the need for more clarity from one project to another.

“In the past, we didn’t have a central platform that would have given us a perfect overview of ongoing projects. That’s why it wasn’t always easy to identify dependencies, plan resources, and assess project progress,” says Holger Gast, Head of Program and Project Management at Viessmann Group.

Viessman needed a better way to integrate management across divisions and provide stakeholders with all essential information and project statuses when required. Ideally, all of this information would be in one centralized area.

The Viessmann Solution

The project management department found the platform they needed in Planview. By partnering with Planview, they were able to support parallel planning, control, and implementation of projects across the companies within Viessmann Group.

“Now everyone can see what colleagues are working on and what progress a project is making. This increases acceptance and the uniform understanding of working toward the same goal — both within a project and in other projects,” says Gast.

Planning, controlling, monitoring, and reporting are now seamless for Viessmann’s team, with helpful integrations across departments and projects. Priorities are crystal clear, and bandwidth is entirely transparent. As a result, teams can more readily identify opportunities to collaborate across the organization. They can also enter these situations more confidently, knowing they can easily share and visualize accurate data to make connected work more effective and efficient.

Across various industries—from automotive to consumer goods to pharmaceutical—one of the most impactful areas for driving improvement points to the methods and solutions used to manage product portfolios. To stay competitive in fast-moving markets, enable adaptivity, drive innovation, and ensure optimal returns, there is an immediate need to break free from traditional, static product portfolio management solutions that breed work silos. A more modern, transparent pathway to connected work is necessary for optimizing a product pipeline.

With a partner like Planview, greater visibility into product portfolio data and workflows helps organizations take massive strides towards accelerating innovation, reducing costs and cycle time, and adapting to disruptions. Each becomes a more easily obtainable goal crucial to staying ahead of the competition.

If even a single of these case studies inspired you to revisit how you work across product portfolio management, download Planview’s buyer’s guide to learn everything you need to know about selecting the right product portfolio management solution for prioritizing work and delivering on innovation.

If you’re ready to partner with Planview, watch our solution demo today to get started.