How to Execute Intelligent Product Innovation in a Digital Age

Consumer goods companies are facing a modern "innovation paradox." While brands and retailers are flooded with a constant stream of customer data and new ideas — evidenced by thousands of new patents annually — many companies struggle to execute effectively, leaving nearly half of their products on markdown due to inventory surplus and diluted market differentiation.This webinar transcript highlights a conversation about the internal and external pressures that are driving a shift away from traditional, product-centric approaches to holistic, portfolio-driven strategies. Learn about the challenges of organizational silos, the limitations of disconnected legacy systems and the critical need to tie business strategy directly to execution. Modern solutions, such as advanced visualization tools, unified product lifecycle management (PLM) backbones and enterprise-wide artificial intelligence can drastically accelerate decision-making, optimize margins and streamline collaboration between cross-functional teams.Liz Dominguez: Hello everyone, and welcome to "Ideas Are Easy, Execution Is Hard: Rethinking Product Portfolio Management." My name is Liz Dominguez and I'm CGT's senior editor.I'm excited to welcome Eric Symon, VP of CPG and retail for the Americas at Centric Software, and Ketan Suri, director of digital continuity and PML at Capgemini. Eric and Ketan, why don't you each give our audience some brief background about your role and your expertise, and then Eric, you can feel free to dive into today's discussion.Eric Symon: Glad to be with everybody today. A little bit about me. My background is primarily in the technology and solution space. I have been in that most of my career in supply chain planning, retail analytics, PLM, pricing optimizations, and some other types of software companies and solutions. I joined Centric just a few months ago and am looking forward to talking to you today about optimizing portfolio management. So Ketan, over to you.Ketan Suri: I actually am with Capgemini Invent, which is our advisory and consulting services for Capgemini. I've been in this area for product development, new product development and PLM for more than 25 years now. And I've seen a lot of changes as we have seen over the years. So happy to be here, happy to be engaging with you, and talking through how we look at the brand management, product management and portfolio management going to the product side. And we would also love to hear back from you on what your experience has been as well. Back to you, Eric.Symon: Thanks, Ketan. Just diving into this topic a little bit today on rethinking portfolio management. And the way we wanted to guide this discussion is to talk about a few topics. The first is the innovation challenge. And the thesis here is that companies don't lack ideas. We have plenty of those, but it's figuring out how to execute on those ideas and what the best ones are. We're going to talk a little bit about that. We're going to talk about why portfolio visibility matters. Very, very critical to really look at the whole portfolio as you're going through the planning process. Related to that, we're going to talk about moving from a product-centric to a portfolio-driven approach. We'll spend some time there. Probably where we'll spend the bulk of the time is on connecting strategy and execution in this area. That seems to be where there are a lot of good strategies out there, but executing on those in today's environment is proving to be very, very difficult.We'll give you a little case study as well, and I think we'll wrap up with some Q&A. When we're looking at this topic, there are both factors that are external to a company, and there are challenges with the internal workings of companies that make it difficult to address the portfolio management challenge. So Ketan, I don't know if you want to share some ideas on that before we dive into the details here.Suri: Sure. Eric. What I love to do is take some analogies. So one of my favorite analogies I take is of a human body or organism. Eric just shared that there are some external factors; there might be some internal factors. For example, if you are seeing some dryness in your body, internally what happens is the body creates some white blood cells, which we call agents. They attack the area and try to soothe it, calm it down and make it do better. So think of it as, internally we have a team; teams who get together to form something to achieve a specific purpose at a specific time at a specific location. That location is the part of your body or part of the organization. From the outside, if you see you can actually apply a cream, which is a very localized version of what is happening. But how we look at it is from a broader perspective of these symptoms.These symptoms become visible because there is an underlying thing that might be going on for a certain while and the symptoms have started to show up now. For example, one of the symptoms of dryness is that we may be losing some moisture in our bodies. The simple thing for me is to take cold showers — that'll keep your body hydrated as well. So not only the area where the eczema or the dryness is, but also the whole body. As Eric and I shared with you, we bring in a perspective of both inside out, as well as taking a bigger picture view of the organization and how things work together. Another thing which I want to start with, and probably we'll get back to later, is the entry cases of the interfaces that happen between different functions within an organization.So when you look at portfolio management, we talk about product management; that is where the opportunities are. Every function is actually state-of-the-art in itself. And let's talk more about how the interfaces and the advances in how each of them brings together the elements, the data, the processes and people that'll help us understand this topic a little better. Back to you, Eric.Symon: Very good analogy. So as we dive into the agenda here and the first look at the innovation paradox, brands don't lack for ideas and they don't lack for data. There are insights coming from everywhere. So we have insights from consumers. There's been a lot of investment in the customer experience. There's a lot of feedback that comes in through that. Certainly, social media trends, the explosion of social media, ideas and insights come from trying to be more competitive in the market and watching what things that our competitors are doing. But just to put this in some perspective, when we talk about brands, we don't lack ideas. In the past year, across all consumer products, there were 37,000 new patents granted in the consumer products area across food, beverage, apparel, packaged goods, etc. I'm going to use Nike as an example because they've been in the public spotlight for their turnaround strategy that's very relevant for what we're talking about. They've had 348 new patents alone in the past 12 months. So companies are innovating. They're coming up with new ideas. It's not really about ideas. It's about how do you execute on those ideas better? How do you use all the data that's available to you from all of these different areas and channels and make better decisions? What's interesting is you got this explosion of products, an explosion of ideas, yet at any given time, 40% to 45% of the products that are on the market are on markdown because of too much inventory. Forget about consumer discounts and expecting sales and everything else. You have a huge percentage of products that are on markdown, even as line extensions, and so forth, continue to explode. So it's an interesting paradox. All this data, a lot of complexity, introducing all these new products, innovation pipelines are full, but you've got all these products on markdown, and companies' profit margins are very challenged. So before we talk about this a little further, Ketan, maybe you want to share your thoughts on this particular area.Suri: Yep. Eric, you're right. So not only are you talking about the patterns, but the products themselves, because of the changing nature of the consumer and the customers. So in this world, we talk about both the consumer and the customer. The need for personalization, the need for contextualization, for those specific consumers, has become very important for certain industries. If we talk about the FMCG part of the CPG part of the industries, we are seeing a similar context on the industrialized side as well. Talking about the Black & Decker, Home Depot, Lowe's, where they are creating and manufacturing products, which are localized to the local market, and how they sell it, how they market it, and how they define and drive the values for all of them. So yes, you're right. The complexity, the variations, the new ideas — everything becomes a bigger headache for our brand and portfolio management.Symon: Yeah. So, if you look at the challenges or the pain points, if you will, when looking at this process of portfolio management, why is it becoming more complex? We've talked about the explosion of products and the explosion of data that's out there. There are also enormous pressures on a number of different fronts. You got pressure from consumers and retailers for a faster response in terms of product introductions and new innovation pipelines. Product development cycles are still anywhere from six to 24 months, or nine to 24 months. So they're very long, yet there's a lot of pressure to make those faster and bring those timelines down. There's enormous margin pressure. I mean, there's always margin pressure, right? But if you look at supply chain complexities and challenges and disruptions today, costs, tariffs, just place incredible pressures on companies. And so they're trying to answer a fairly basic question.When we're trying to sell a product, what should the assortment look like? What should we buy? How do we get that right? Yet you've got all these complexities, all of these challenges complicating the issue for you. The other challenge that's more of an internal challenge, as Ketan was talking about before, is that only about 10 to 20% of the data available to retailers and brands is actually being used to make these decisions, despite all the data that's out there. And a lot of that's because of the silos that exist within organizations. They have the organizations not set up properly. The use of spreadsheets and PowerPoint to try to do collaboration and connected analysis really isn't working like it needs to. And contributing to a growing gap between what our strategy and then how do we execute that strategy, taking into consideration all of the data that's coming in. So Ketan, I know you've got some thoughts on this as well.Suri: Yes, Eric. And I would like to actually take a step back and also talk about when we talk about what the roles are impacted, when we talk about portfolio and we talk about product. So I've had a chance to talk to a few of the brand managers and a few of the product development leads as well. So as you think about it, if you ask them, "What is your day in life? Are you focused on one single thing?" The answer never is, "yes," right? Because if you look at the brand management or portfolio management, the leadership is, or the leader is looking at all the strategy part of it, the communication and the consistency based on which part of the globe you are focusing, which area you are focusing, which environment you are focusing, which country, which state you are focusing as well. And then you are bringing in all the extensions and innovations.They also talk about how we are measured by our performance. How are our products doing? How are they selling? Do we need any changes? How are you targeting the market? How are you optimizing your brands? How are you segmenting those? What are the risks associated with these things? As Mark said, there is a lot of gap between all of the things that a brand has to manage, and also how that information flows into the product development and how we can look at those interfaces. That is where we started. That is where the opportunities of the maximum improvements are, is how we interface with the product development.The same story is on the product development side because they are now responding to maybe not just one brand, but as a big large corporation or even a growing corporation, as you expand into different markets, different segments, different brands, the product development is empowered, is looking for information from all of them — and they are responding to all of them and looking at the synergies that they can create. So all of this brings in a great opportunity for us to look at it holistically end-to-end. And that is what we want to dive into next.Suri: There are a lot of things that a brand manager typically does. What we are trying to showcase here is what the current activities are that are performed in the current focus area. For example, you are looking at a new initiative or a new innovation that you are trying to develop, and around that you have a program. You are focused on the program management, you are focused on the activities around that project management, you are focused on how to market it, how to target a certain set of consumers or customers going to that. Now, if we look at forward-looking stuff, first of all, we cannot think through this as siloed, whether it's an IT approach or whether this is a business approach. For us, we look at all the things. My simple takeaway: it's process, it's people, it's technology and it's data.And within people, we have roles. So if you look at the impacted roles, obviously, the CXOs of the companies are impacted because that is where the money is made and money is spent. Brand manager who's managing the brand and the portfolio, or you might call it the portfolio manager, portfolio director, portfolio VP. There's product development involved. There is a marketing team that is involved. Consumer insights and marketing research are a big part of this. Design packaging teams, sales and distribution teams and other parts of the organizations that are brought in. So when we talk about people, how do you actually create and get this information to leaders in an easy, accessible way that can help you make better and more educated decisions? That is why on the right-hand side you see that we are bringing in not only the technology, but how we look at the end-to-end value for what we bring in to enhance that information.For example, if you are looking at a specific product that you are looking at and viewing, how is that product doing in the market? What is the customer feedback that is coming from the market? How do you convert that feedback into something that could be digested by the product management, and from the product management side, how do you develop those things and be fast enough, nimble enough and respond back to your customers or consumer needs? So that's kind of an example that is becoming more and more real and faster in this industry as well. As Eric talked about, the faster time to market, even the right time and contextualization, is becoming more and more important.Symon: Thank you, Ketan. That was really some insightful information there. And I think the importance of this topic and integrating visibility into portfolio insights across the assortment plans, so integrating the merchandise financial plan and the assortment plan and getting alignment across different functions. We're seeing a lot of companies undertake these kinds of projects these days. In the food industry, you've got something called a design-to-value initiative. So companies are looking to optimize formulas, streamline their assortments, and simplify packaging, all in the face of all of these pressures that we talked about earlier. So in order to do that design-to-value, they need to rethink their processes, they need to use the right tools, they need to incorporate AI into that. Again, going back to Nike, as part of their turnaround, they've publicly announced their pillars for their strategy to turn the company around, and assortment planning and assortment quality are a very big part of that. So what you've got is a lot of companies, their product lines have become too extended, a lot of line extensions. The differentiation between them has been diluted, and they don't have enough depth on the things that are really moving, and they've got all this data coming in from consumers and so forth and are struggling to use it. So it's a very important topic. We're seeing a lot of companies undertake the strategic initiatives around this, not just as a project, but really a very, very important corporate initiative. And I'm sure you're seeing that too as well, Ketan.Suri: Yes, yes, absolutely. It's not just around the CPG companies, the examples that you're talking about, but it is also going beyond industries. Thinking about how industries are evolving, for example, we work across industries, and we get exposure to a lot of different things that are happening around product development and how the products are being managed as well. For example, for industrial products, you talk about lightbulbs, or you talk about the shelvings, you talk about the refrigeration units, you talk about even the handheld devices that are coming into the market. If you look at the companies that are manufacturing these, and even white-labeling these from others, how they are managing their brands becomes very intricate. The SKUs are expanding very fast because if they do not respond to the market, they actually are left behind.What we hear from our clients is the variations in the products, the number of SKUs, as you said, Eric, the wafer-thin margins and optimizations. How can we all put that together and drive it to more benefit and drive the right impact to both the consumer and the product companies internally as well? It is more important for us now than ever to look internally at how we can enable our associates, our working leaders who need the right data at the right time to make those decisions, and to be able to make those pivots faster as well. So that's my take. Symon: And obviously the ways of working, decision flows, processes have to be rethought in light of trying to execute on these types of initiatives, and then the technology has to come in to be able to support them. We talked to a lot of companies that are working on these kinds of problems, and sort of a common theme that we see across these companies, they tell us a couple of things. One, they have assortment plans being developed, usually using a variety of visual tools that are fairly disconnected. They've got a lot of financial and data analysis going on in spreadsheets. And if they're planning a line or an assortment visually and they make some decisions, those decisions then have to be moved into the financial part of it, into the spreadsheets. If they start with the data and the financials and they make some decisions, well, those decisions then need to be moved into the visual tool, and it's not really conducive to being able to collaborate on something that is inherently a cross-functional and collaborative process.There are a lot of people and a lot of functions involved in making these decisions. In order to scale that and to do it quickly, you have to have the right types of technologies. And one of the things that we're seeing as a growing trend out there is in combining the visualization with the analysis. The combination of those two things has really been a game-changer for a lot of companies. They're able to make decisions more quickly and integrate a vast amount of data into a single platform in order to be able to optimize their portfolio. So I don't know, Ketan, what you're seeing out there, but that's from our experience; we're seeing a lot of that, particularly over the last 12 months.Suri: Yeah, Eric. So when we talk about optimization, again, we are talking about variation in your SKUs. How do you look at it differently? And you're right, Eric. One of the customers I was talking to is looking at, "Hey, how many variations do I have on this product? Can we simplify the product?" Can we enable our customers to select better options? That makes it easier for them and easier for us as companies to respond to them faster and at the scale that they want it to be. So yeah, you're absolutely right. The other thing that I'm also seeing, Eric, when we are talking about this whole concept, is that companies have also started to delve into what we might call concept-to-value. Within that, think about design-to-value. Think about your ideas as you started with. There are a lot of ideas that come to a lot of people within the company from outside customers.How do you manage those ideas? How do you evaluate whether that idea will be successful in the market? How do you make those decisions? Can you make real margins on what the market is asking for and what you are manufacturing at the cost, the quality that needs to be there as well, whether that's your regulatory challenges, whether it's other challenges as well from a data perspective too? What we are looking at is companies or clients asking, "Can you define the whole end-to-end concept to value? And tell us whether we will be successful in building and making money out of these products as well." As well as how successful those products will be from a market needs perspective. So those are the tiebacks that we are looking at and that we are working on.Symon: Ketan, I think as we talk about solutions and technologies that people are applying to the companies, to the problem, I think we'd be negligent if we didn't talk a little bit about AI because obviously everybody's asking. I know in every meeting that I'm in, somebody asks about AI, and there are a lot of different views on it, a lot of different approaches, and so forth. What we're seeing works for people is to think about AI in a couple of ways. One is to reduce time on task. What do you mean by that? Well, we talked earlier about all the data and all the insights, all the explosion of data that's available to people. Well, time on task means how you organize and make sense out of that data, right? How do you shorten the time to consider all of the data and all the options that are out there for you?And then the second thing is, how do you reduce the time to a decision? Because speed to market is absolutely critical. First, you have to organize the information and the options. And then the second thing you have to do is be able to make sense of it all, make some good decisions and understand the impacts of those decisions. So there are tons of practical applications of AI across various consumer-facing industries. We've seen food companies using AI to dynamically reformulate recipes, and again, as they try to do this design to value, how can we substitute ingredients without sacrificing quality but still reduce the cost? And if you could speak to some of the examples of AI and the approaches that you're seeing out there, because I think that's a really, really important topic for everybody.Suri: So yes, so you are right in that this year, actually, AI has been very, very transformative. How we are looking at and what we are listening to from our clients is, I put it in three different buckets. First of all, AI is nothing new to anyone anymore, okay? Companies, people and individuals have already evaluated, already used or are using, and have created a lot of different agents, a lot of different things with AI. We use Gemini, we use Copilot, we use a lot of things which are already there day in, day out. So that's one bucket on, yes, how we are using it. The second bucket is what you have done in the past, and it has been sporadic because every different function looks at the opportunity to try and bring in some kind of automation.When we talk about automation as well, in our mind as we are technologists, we look at optimization of the processes, we look at the elimination of the processes, we look at the standardization of the processes, we look at the robotization of the processes, and we look at the automation, robotization. No matter what level of process optimization you have done, you have used these levers, and you are bringing in more and more robotization. And by robotization, I mean using AI, agents or creating widgets out of AI. That's the second one. The third, more critical portion is that clients are coming to us, friends are coming to us asking, "Hey, we have been on this AI journey for a while now — it has been three years, five years, seven years on machine learning on AI — and we have played around a lot. But now what we are missing is overall enterprise strategy."So as I was alluding to people, process, technology and data, this became part of our full enterprise stack, enterprise architecture as we call it. And we look at these things, and how do you look at the technologies or the solutions that you are bringing in to enable that enterprise-wide AI growth? Are you investing in a single side note, which is just a one-off product or one-off solution on AI? Or are you bringing in a technology that will help you evolve across the board, whether it is embedded into the solution, into the platform, or whether it is sitting outside on contextualized data? When we talk about contextualized data, it goes back to the same point: yes, every function in an organization has become very intelligent. They have worked on their portions of it. For example, R&D data is kosher, as they call it.Their processes are really good. Same with the brand management, same with the marketing side of it, and probably the same with manufacturing as well. So if you look at it from a bigger picture viewpoint, there are still some discrepancies and a lack of context for the data if you throw all of that data into one bucket, one data lake, one data pool. When we talk about context-sensitive data, how do you connect one data to another, how do you connect your market input to your brand, to your product, to your raw material, to your test data, to your manufacturing? How does that come together? So we are seeing a lot of those things being talked about, being orchestrated and being architected. So it is a different layer of enterprise architecture enabled by AI that is coming into play right now. To close this off, again, to draw a simple picture for us in our minds, if you look at it.So we try to draw boxes around things that we do. On paper, if the top box is talking about the business strategy, the middle box is how you make that strategy real with your business functions, whether it's brand or portfolio management, whether it's product, whether it's manufacturing, and so forth. Then, on the bottom of that, there are two big enablers, if you think of it. On the left-hand side is your people stack. How do you scale up those people and bring those people to the level of what needs to be delivered as an objective from your strategy, from your CXOs coming down? On the right-hand side are the processes and tools that you are bringing in, including the AI. So these two become the pillars of how you deliver it to the clients. To add on to it further, we are also evaluating technologies that are bringing and enabling the whole organizational chain and management.When you talk about, like Eric said, there is a need for visualization of your products. You may be using visual brand portfolio management or you have a product lifecycle management that you're using, core pillar platforms, but you also have to enable the people side of it. How do you enable your people to get educated, trained and to be at the same level? We talk about those technologies as well, bringing in and influencing both the people side and the process and tooling side as well. That is the layer that is coming into play, and it has been very effective for us as well. That is how I draw the picture with the full organization, with enterprise architecture coming to what the business needs to deliver for their customer base as well.Symon: As you look at either the AI or enterprise data layer, you look at visual portfolio planning, kind of the data and decision layer to enable these kinds of new processes. How critical do you think to have that data and a level of integration with the foundational systems like PLMs? That's where all your product data is. That's your sort of single source of the truth for everything. What are your thoughts on that?Suri: That is right, Eric. I will bring in a little bit of a different flavor because I was talking to a manufacturing leader and he said, "What I need is a visual view. If something goes wrong, I should be able to drag it back and see where it went wrong, how it went wrong, how it was defined and what was the first input to it, when it got started." That traceability is not theoretical right now. It is real. There are systems that are being connected and going back to your point on data being connected, this can only happen when your data is connected end-to-end. When your customer inputs ties to your requirements, your requirements tie to your brand, your brand ties to your product, and obviously, those products, when they are sent to manufacturing, that data is tied. Yes, you are right. PLM is the backbone for how you define a product, but if you look at organizations, they have the ERPs of the world, and they have the CRMs of the world as well.So in my mind, you have the core pillar applications, but as you enable AI, as you enable the data fabric or the data layer at the bottom of these pillar applications, and you try to orchestrate the processes above these. For example, the visual boards … they can sit on a PLM system which orchestrates the visualization of those products and helps make decisions. I also want to leave this notion that intent is very important for our clients as well, and for us. Everybody here, the intent is to enable that quick decision-making and also remove those five meetings on your calendar as a brand director or brand VP. That is a big savings for you from a time, quality and time-to-market perspective for you personally as well, right?Suri: When we look at these solutions, it's not only for the product; it's for the productivity of the associates as well. That is how we think about it on the layer, the pillar applications, and then the orchestration of the processes that we talk about.Symon: Excellent points. Just to bring all of the information together that we've been talking about on this webinar, I wanted to do a little bit of a case study. And in this particular case, and this is about really focusing on portfolio optimization, target assortments, etc. This is a large, international grocery company and somebody that we started working with a while back — probably 18 months ago — as they were trying to figure out how to implement an approach to develop more targeted assortments, No. 1, and assortments that were relevant to consumers in all of the different international markets that they had. And No. 2, how to streamline the process for getting products and ideas to market. So these two things were very highly related. The approach that we sort of landed on together is really what we've been talking about — a combination of planning integrated with visualization so that they could gather what was really a huge amount of data, seamlessly integrated from all these markets around the world.And some of the things they were trying to consider were things like the local preferences of consumers, cultural differences between the markets, and holidays between the markets. At the same time, they're trying to do some SKU rationalization across their brands and accelerate the whole process. So, trying to get all this data in one place, use visualization tools to help them make better decisions, and to do it more quickly. And in the process of doing that, the benefits that they were looking for, and actually the results that were delivered during this, they were able to cut down almost 90% of the time in assortment planning, which in a lot of our customer situations, we see anywhere from a 70% to a 95% reduction in time because of what we talked about before. You're automating the collection of all the data, you're integrating visual representations with analytical tools that consider the data and all the financials and help you to streamline that whole process.Also, time saved for marketing teams. They were able to put together, on a regular basis, more effective and efficient assortments in all our regions around the world. They wanted to have some level of commonality across all those regions. Everybody had to be on an integrated tool to be able to do that, but they also had to account for the localized differences in the different markets, and really, a great success story here, and they're doing very well. One of the other things on the backend is that they also integrated this back into their supplier interactions and got smarter about their raw materials, planning their raw material sourcing to kind of support the whole process.I'd say if you look at the kind of things, Ketan, that you've been talking about in terms of benefits from these types of projects, rethinking the process, rethinking the technology that you're applying, we're seeing improvements of operating margins between 5% and 12%. We're seeing a reduction in assortment planning times, a reduction in overall planning times and improved agility. And I don't know if that's consistent with your experience and what you're seeing in the market, but that's certainly what we've been seeing recently.Suri: Yep, Eric, you're right. We are seeing very similar things coming from our clients and different scale of clients, as I would say, talking about the big brands and the companies that are evolving and want to grow fast as well. Symon: Well, I think we're just about at time before we go into the Q&A.Dominguez: We do have a few questions. So the first one here is, "Are you seeing an increase in companies evaluating or replacing legacy planning solutions with more modern platforms? And if so, what factors are driving the shift and what business challenges are organizations hoping to solve?" Symon: We're seeing a lot of companies investing in projects in this particular area to improve their overall portfolio optimization process, their assortment planning process, and tying that all in with financials. We cited the Nike example. They publicly talked about how addressing this area is critical to their turnaround. We see a lot of this going on across apparel and footwear companies, across food companies. And I think there are a few reasons for it. One is that there are some legacy technologies that are out there that have been around for a long time. They're coming to end-of-life, and frankly, companies are looking to replace them with more modern architectures.They are looking to upgrade their technology solutions from the legacy kind of model to ones that are centered around platforms that leverage microservices, architecture that gives them the ability to layer AI onto that. So it's happening now, and it's very strategic to a lot of companies in terms of being able to deliver improved financial results, execute turnarounds, and just the whole thought process has changed around this. And so we're seeing a ton of projects in this particular area. So, Ketan, again, your views would be helpful as well.Suri: You covered it very well and extensively, Eric. The only thing I want to add is that when we are looking at or when our clients are looking at changing those legacy applications, they are not looking for newer solutions. They're looking for AI-enabled solutions because that is where they think the efficiencies come and are going to play, and whether those AI efficiencies fit into their enterprise architecture as well. So I'll just add that, Eric.Dominguez: I have a second question here: "Shifting from a product-centric to a portfolio-driven model often requires a cultural change. So what specific KPIs should leadership teams track to incentivize cross-functional collaboration instead of more localized siloed wins? And what are the new KPIs that people need to be on the lookout for that maybe they hadn't been tracking before to enable that whole change around portfolio optimization?"Suri: When we talk about KPIs, I look at them a little differently. There is a vision that happens, whether it's the simplification of the ideation complexity or the optimization of your planning and merchandising execution. Whether it's measuring the efficiencies of your product lines or segments. Whether it's curating or getting better at product development. Whether it is strategically aligned to the programs and how you want to execute it. And obviously, how do you optimize the resource allocation? KPIs become your directions, and over time, you should be able to evolve with your KPIs as you grow. Those KPIs are at that point a snapshot, right? That is what you're focused on, but not for a long time.If you're looking to grow from a $200 to $400 million company or a half-a-billion-dollar to a billion-dollar company or even beyond that, right? You cannot be working with the older KPIs that you set two to five years back, and that is how we look at it when we provide the assessments and the solutions, and the approaches to any technical or process changes, too. Strategy comes together; KPIs become directional, but focus on the North Star because that also keeps evolving as well. We have tons of examples of how companies have started from something different, and they have become something different. I learned about the story of Samsung. Samsung was a grocery store, if I remember it correctly, and now we know them very differently.Similarly, companies have evolved into different things, and so have their own KPIs. So that is my bigger answer, and a question back to our audience is, are you really sticking to the older KPIs, or are you taking them as directionally fit and evolving with your customers, with your strategy and with the market as well?Dominguez: I think we have time for one more question here. "So brands rarely suffer from a shortage of new ideas. Social media and AI have kind of supercharged innovation. From your vantage point, where do companies typically hit a wall when they're trying to turn a fire hose of ideas into a scalable, structured portfolio?"Symon: There are probably a couple of different aspects to this one. In our experience and a lot of studies have shown that with all of these new ideas and data coming in, companies are typically only able to use about 10% to 20% of that data. So what's happening in that process? Well, if it were a small amount of data and you didn't have to scale, it'd be fairly straightforward. You can use some of the tools that you have today. Given the volume of data, the need to scale and the need to do it with speed, do quick analysis and quick decisions. Where I see a lot of them hitting the wall is that they want to incorporate spreadsheets into the process because everybody's familiar with them.It helps with adoption, but you've got to put everything in a platform that kind of ties together the visualization aspects of it in terms of planning with all of the data and financial analysis and try to scale that way. Lacking that, it's very, very difficult. You do hit a wall pretty quickly. There's just not enough time to manually bring in all of the data and put it into different disconnected tools. I mean, this is, as we said, a cross-functional process. It requires collaboration, and my bias is probably on the technology side around what needs to be applied there. Ketan can probably talk more about the process and change management aspects of why this is a challenge.Suri: I think everybody knows about the process, but where I keep going back is the people side of it. We need to take care of our people. We need to take care of the customers as well, from our side. Can we enable our people to help our customers? How we do that is also to educate them on what we are thinking. If we are bringing a new technology that is AI-enabled, how can we enable our associates to use it better, to help them use it? It makes no sense for somebody to own a car and still drive a bike. Well, that could be a bad analogy in a way, but still, when the time is of the essence, some things work better, and other things may not.I've heard a lot of analogies around this as well. If a square tire were put on a car, would it go faster? So some analogies work, some not. I think common sense will prevail, but at the end of the day, it has to be led by the people. People have to be enabled by the right solutions, and have to bring in the impact that needs to be created as well.Dominguez: Okay. Thank you. I'm afraid that's all the time that we have today. A big thank you to today's speakers, and Centric Software for sponsoring, and we'll see everyone on the next webinar.

How to Execute Intelligent Product Innovation in a Digital Age

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