Talking Strategy

ACCO Brands is one of the world's largest suppliers of branded office products, with annual revenues of nearly $2 billion. The company's products are marketed in more than 100 countries and brands include Swingline, Kensington, Wilson Jones, Quartet, GBC, Day-Timer and Rexel. Bill Bucklew, director performance excellence, ACCO Brands Workspace Tools, says,"We have a long history of market leadership and innovation. And we are focused on delivering exceptional value by remaining at the forefront of our industry. Everything we do is focused on delivering innovative new products of superior quality that support consumers' needs for greater productivity at work, at home and at school."

 

Five years ago, the company realized that it needed to standardize processes for consistency and control as ACCO Brands grew sales worldwide and continuously improved the globally integrated organization. Bucklew explains, "Our strategy is based on process excellence across our extended supply chain from brand management and new product development and introduction through manufacturing and distribution. We wanted to be better able to base our product development decisions on hard data from across the product lifecycle all the way from design innovation and manufacturability to consumers' use in the field."

 

According to Bucklew, true product lifecycle management (PLM) for ACCO Brands is a strategy involving processes that cut across the business where technology plays a supporting and enabling role. This strategy is driven through a team approach where the executive team manages the decision-making process with direct involvement from all of the different teams and responsible people who get the job done. "Sound governance from our perspective can only come from an intense focus on the business needs necessary to achieve results," adds Bucklew.

 

He goes on to say, "As we continue to evolve our PLM strategy we use software technology to support the underlying processes. In 2004, we implemented the Aras solution for enterprise PLM and, in addition to other factors, we focused on flexibility and ease of deployment, which are important to our strategy." Aras is a Microsoft-based enterprise PLM solution.

 

Having a well-defined product development and introduction process that is specific to ACCO Brands enables the company to compete based on its processes. Bucklew notes, "Therefore, we need to maintain our proprietary way of developing new products. We believe that we are innovating on both our products and our processes, and we feel that it is important to our competitive advantage in the marketplace."

 

The Aras initiative was approached as ACCO Brands approaches all of its strategic process improvement initiatives, from a phased perspective. This is particularly true when an implementation of enterprise software, like Aras, is involved. Blair explains, "We started by standardizing the product change process and getting our product information under control. This helped us better manage our new product development and introduction process, as well as, our plants and global manufacturing partners."

 

Then, they proceeded to implement quality processes for corrective and preventive actions to ensure continuous improvement throughout product lines and across the supply chain. "As we move forward, we are always looking for areas to improve that will further extend our leadership in the market and provide new ways to innovate for our customers," says Blair.

 

The drivers for ACCO Brands' PLM strategy have evolved over time, while the overarching strategic intent around time to market, quality and profitability has remained consistent. From a process perspective the company takes into account everything from ideation through introduction and volume manufacturing with end of life decisions included. Bucklew says, "Since putting the PLM strategy in place we have shifted our area of focus over time to address improvement areas. For example, in 2004 we concentrated on getting our change management process better defined to ensure that our product related information was versioned properly and that we were able to drive changes more quickly. By focusing on the engineering change process we were able to reduce product change cycle times by over 50 percent."