Avon Connects Worldwide Innovation Efforts

As the world's largest direct seller, Avon Products Inc. delivers close to 2,000 new products a year in the beauty, fashion jewelry and apparel categories, and markets them to women in more than 100 countries. In the Q&A that follows, Lisa Midyette, executive director of global marketing project integration for Avon Products, reveals details on how Avon took a very manual and redundant set of siloed new product development business processes -- which impacted everything from ideation, conceptualization and feasibility to development, implementation and post launch learning -- and turned it into a highly scalable environment that enables cross-team, multi-country collaboration. 
 
CGT: How much focus is product innovation given at Avon?

Midyette: Innovation is a huge part of our business. Our selling cycle is supported through brochures (catalogs), which are issued as many as 26 times per year in some markets. We rely on newness in each brochure to give our Representatives opportunities to attract new customers and build relationships with existing customers.     Innovation is a major focus within the company, and we carefully plan the growth of our innovation year over year to make sure that our innovation portfolio is growing at a healthy rate.

CGT: How does Avon manage the new product development process on a global scale? What challenges does this present and how do you tackle them? 

Midyette: We embarked on a project to globalize our new product development process about four years ago. At that time, Avon had a different product development process in every country. We first focused on developing one globally-aligned process that would work for everyone. We implemented a global new product development process in late 2005, and from then until earlier this year we were running that process effectively, but it was not automated and required a lot of administrative work to manage. We wanted our new product development associates to be able to focus more of their time on innovation and less on administration, so we pursued a systems solution.

CGT: Avon recently implemented a PLM platform to support
new product development. Can you share details about the selection process and implementation?

Midyette: We researched 20 different solutions, narrowed the list to three for a proof of concept and then selected ENOVIA [from Dassault Systemes]. We found this system met all of our needs. Working with Integware, it took about a year to develop the first release of the system, which we call "Horizon." Avon's Horizon system launched globally to about 500 users in May 2008.
 
CGT: How is the Horizon system used today within Avon?

Midyette: One of the most powerful applications of Avon's Horizon system is to plan and manage our global innovation calendar. We are able to plan product launches from a global perspective, tracking product launch plans for each region and market and how large each launch will be. All of this data is live and is updated whenever changes are made to the launch timing or volumes. It is a really fantastic way to see how our launch timing flows across quarters for different categories and brands.

We also use Horizon to manage our stage gating process. We are able to easily prepare information necessary for decision-making at the stage gates and record decisions and actions coming out of the gates.

Using Horizon provides visibility to data that we have never had before, enabling various supply chain functions, like global sourcing and supply planning. We now have easy access to data that used to take hours and hours to compile.

We just went live in May 2008 so it is too soon to really gauge the benefits insofar, but we have received great feedback from the users. Our goal is to reduce the administrative workload by 50 percent. So far, we have been deluged by requests to get access to the system, and users are referencing the Horizon system and reports when they ask for improvements to other systems: "Why can't we have a report like we get from Horizon?"

CGT: What are Avon's future plans for product management and development?

Midyette: We have a long-term plan for additional releases of the Horizon system to implement project management, package specifications and other functionality. We plan to extend the platform to replace some of our existing systems to provide a single point of access to the data that users need to develop new products.

CGT: What best practices can you share with other consumer goods companies that are looking to better their new product development and introduction capabilities?

Midyette: Start with the process first. One of the reasons that the implementation of the new Horizon system went very smoothly is that we spent a significant amount of time standardizing and aligning the process and actually ran the process without systems support for several years. This allowed us to refine the process and actually caused users to ask for the system