December 13, 2021
This content relates to : NEW PRODUCT & SERVICE DEVELOPMENT
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. My name is Michael Gorman, Vice President of new product development and product management at Stanley Black & Decker. I wanted to take a few moments today to speak with you about our milestone product development process.
We apply this process to our new product development, ideation and innovation concepts and in some cases to our value improvement and capacity expansion initiatives. Really, anytime we’re procuring capital to support a new product concept or a product change. We apply a version of our milestone development process to that. And the driving reasons for that, really first and foremost, come with having full support of all of our business leaders before we procure time, talent, and treasure to a program. It’s really important that top leadership aligns on where we’re spending our capital dollars, as well as where we’re applying our very valuable people resources. And to take that a step further, the process itself really focuses on making sure that we have a completed idea before we start to apply resource in development time to that and what I mean by that is we will go through a series of ideation and thought to really make sure that we have a comprehensive concept in place and then we bring that into, call it our milestone 1. So we ask for a product or concept summary.
We want to review the lessons learned from maybe previous programs that were in some ways maybe similar to this or maybe it was the genesis of why we had to do this because we’re trying to fix something. So we want to review the lessons learned from previous journeys that we’ve taken. We want to have an initial financial assessment done. Part of our discovery work is trying to understand at what price would a product be sold and at what expectation through the insights work that we do with the consumer, be it a professional do it yourselfer, looking to purchase a product like this. We wrap all of this type of business assessment and product summary into what we call a trigger document, where it takes both the business elements of our idea, as well as summarizing and ensuring that the user applications that we are attempting to solve are clearly understood and defined. What we also do within the framework of the front end of this milestone process is we do all of our competitive benchmark. So we understand what similar products and substitute products are already in the industry so we have a very clear point of view as we come in with our products suggestion or product idea in terms of what we’re getting into. And then finally, I think this is really important because it flows throughout the entirety of the milestone process. When each process is completed, we have a management review and it’s at that management review that approvals are granted or for that matter, not granted and the team is tasked with going back and figuring out what needs to, needs to improve, what needs to be done.
It’s important when we think about the milestone process to understand that it is customizable to the project or program that we were presenting. So in certain cases where there may be higher asked for capital appropriation and higher investment in terms of the time, talent and treasure of our employees, that will require a larger milestone and longer review. Simply because we want to make sure that along the way, we’re staying very close to not only the progress of the program internally within our company, but what’s happened in the external space? What’s happening with our competition? What’s happening with our customers? What’s happening with the users? To make sure that nothing is changing, that would potentially obsolete the idea that we’re bringing to concepts. I think it’s also important to really highlight the responsibility we have for the financial assessments to remain valid. Because again, the marketplace can change, prices can change, substitute products can come in and they can very quickly upset perhaps what the initial strategy was of the program when you first set. So having a milestone process that is robust, not only in depth in terms of what it asked for at the different levels, at the different gates, but also making sure it’s something that will move along with your project. So as you take it from idea to prototype the concept to an engineering sample line, to then a manufacturing sample line, and then eventually the finished product, that along the way it’s asked you all the necessary gates and all the necessary checks to make sure that we are delivering on what we promised at the onset of the milestone program and when we asked the organization for capital dollars to be appropriated to support our idea.
Ultimately at the end, the best benchmark, the best grade, the best example of our milestone process can be found when you walk the aisles of a Home Depot or a Lowe’s or an Ace, we do go on to an Amazon or an e-commerce site of your favorite retailer, looking for Dewalt or Craftsman or Porter Cable or Stanley or Black & Decker products. And you’ll see every one of our products have gone through our milestone process and we certainly believe at the end of the day ultimately it delivers our commitment on bringing real application solutions to users needs be it on a commercial job site, a residential job site, or the garage or home of a consumer.
Michael Gorman
Vice-President of New Product Development & Product Management
Stanley Black & Decker