Decathlon: Time-to-Market Reduction through Collaborative Design
Client: Decathlon
Challenge: In order to improve its development cycle, Decathlon asked CSC to carry out an audit of its product development function.
Solution: CSC assisted the product managers in building their product strategies. The second objective was to improve development control. The third objective was to implement a Product Data Mangement (PDM) tool.
Results: Shorter design cycles for the various product lines, more products developed on schedules and increased design team productivity.
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Decathlon is both the fourth largest sports retailer in the world, and a manufacturer. In order to improve its development cycle, Decathlon asked CSC to carry out an audit of its product development function. The strategic issue at stake? To reduce time-to-market for Decathlon’s own brand-new products.
Managing development by promoting collaboration
CSC professionals helped Decathlon anticipate product development projects in order to get a global view of future costs and necessary resources.
This first step of any time-to-market reduction strategy is fundamental, since it makes it possible to align all activities (from marketing to production and innovation) and to ensure proper organization scaling to support development.
In the second phase, development performance is optimized. The enterprise must ensure that it has the necessary capacity to manage development by promoting collaboration, both internally and externally.
Talking about the objectives
A first assessment of development process performance led to the identification of the main improvement directions, essentially the implementation of a product plan implementation process to give all product development stakeholders the necessary visibility for prioritizing their actions, and anticipate in order to speed up development.
This approach included the implementation of upstream marketing analysis tools to better assess the success of planned product launches by establishing 3-year project plans for each brand. CSC assisted the product managers in building their product strategies. A stable product plan aggregation process was also implemented in order to obtain a global product plan including all projects and ensuring the alignment of all business units with common goals.
The second objective was to improve development control. Good program management practices adapted to Decathlon's specific context were introduced in order to improve overall activity planning, effectively contain costs and risks, and implement a cross-business collaborative design process. CSC created the new project manager's function, in order to ensure proper leadership of all stakeholders in terms of lead times, costs and product quality.
The third objective was to implement a Product Data Mangement (PDM) tool, in order to improve data accuracy, reduce technical errors and improve communication across the teams throughout the world. In this context, CSC participated in project management within the business team, and actively contributed to change management.