New Product Development Software for a FMCG Manufacturer

Overview

ITSTEADY has automated the client’s business processes of new product development and quality management, enabling fully digital document exchange, approvals, and notifications.

The Project at a Glance

Industry

Personal care product manufacturing

Project team

7 people

Team members’ average experience

3 years

Project duration

4 months

Effort

6 person-months

Technologies

C#, JavaScript, SharePoint Framework, .NET client-side object model (CSOM), React.js, PowerShell

Client

A US-based, multi-billion-dollar revenue FMCG company producing and distributing dozens of personal-care brands worldwide. Its focus areas include, among others, feminine, masculine, infant, and pet care products.

Challenge

The client was looking to automate and facilitate a multi-stage new product development (NPD) process.

The task was to create an internal management system for NPD, covering the processes from ideation to the quality-control stage. The system was to combine data coming from multiple departments in one easy-to-follow stream.

For this, the client required the following functional modules to be included in the new system:

ERP system integration
A catalog of finished products and components
A quality assurance and management system
Automated business processes

In addition, the entire paper-based document management approach was to be replaced with electronic information exchange, including signatures and automatic notifications.

For developing this business process automation system, the client turned to ITSTEADY as an experienced vendor of custom software based on enterprise-grade Microsoft technologies.

Project

ITSTEADY’s team addressed the task in four months, delivering several web applications on top of SharePoint Online and Microsoft Azure.

The project started with an investigation into the company’s current NPD business processes, which allowed the team to design the architecture for software capable of facilitating those processes. Together with the client, the team considered breaking the project into a few solutions, each wrapped in a separate web application.

SharePoint Online was chosen for the system UI. Notifications, templates, and automated business workflows were built on top of SharePoint Online Workflows and Azure Apps. The system security was ensured through AzureAD and Oauth2.

As a result, the team automated the NPD process end to end by delivering the following modules:

A catalog of components and finished products
Multi-stage automation of the new product approval workflow
Notifications
ERP integration

Considering the complexity of processes, with several departments engaged simultaneously, ITSTEADY’s team could effectively enable multiple user roles, in accordance with the project stakeholders’ vision.

The project was delivered by ITSTEADY’s team of one project manager, one business analyst, two full-stack developers, one SharePoint developer, one test engineer, and one SharePoint ICT administrator. As the system was crafted from scratch and required flexibility in its development, the team chose Agile methodology with 2-week iterations.

Results

In four months, the client’s engineers and servicing teams went from paper-based, manually handled NPD processes to the fully automated new product development and management system with electronic document exchange.

To implement the required functionality, ITSTEADY developed a few web applications with further integration into the existing ERP system. Sustaining more than 30 concurrent users, the new software enables a dozen access levels, supports more than 100,000 components in the catalog, and is capable of processing as much as 500Gb of data.

The project became a significant milestone for both the client and ITSTEADY’s team. The goals were achieved in full and within the deadline, which marked a successful collaboration for the two companies.