IoT and smart products are having a dramatic impact on our organizations. Customer expectations are higher, the competition is increasingly fierce, and product portfolio management in this digital age is only becoming more complicated. Leaders must leverage new strategies, processes, tools, and best practices to be successful, tasks that may not always be easy, but are, ultimately, necessary. The convergence of products and technology seen today may be unprecedented, but that doesn’t mean your organization has to fall behind.
While smarter, more connected products are becoming the new norm, only 10% of organizations are delivering significant plans to incorporate them into their portfolio, as revealed in the 6th Product Portfolio Management Benchmark Study. Further, 27% are considering adding these products into their portfolio and 16% are actively developing plans. While it’s clear that many organizations understand the need for smart, connected products, the majority are unsure of where to begin. When facing uncertainty, it’s tempting to lean on traditional processes and resist serious change, but this will only limit your organization’s success in the long-run. Instead of falling victim to this complacency, it’s time to “Get Smart.”
Get on-board with the industry trend of digital products.
Now, you don’t have to be Maxwell Smart or Agent 99 to understand the tremendous impact smart products are having on the industry. That much is clear. But you may feel the need to do a little sleuthing when embarking on a new digital transformation initiative. You want to feel confident when presenting a solution for change within your organization’s traditional processes.
An excellent example of an organization who not only took on digital transformation but excelled during execution is GOJO Industries. Having identified a need to increase hand hygiene compliance within healthcare settings, the GOJO Smart Link Engineering Team developed a solution that could track and monitor hand hygiene compliance and provide real time feedback. Essentially, it’s the Internet of Things meets big data analytics. Through smart products that track things such the use of hand sanitizer dispensers and traffic in and out of rooms, the system can aggregate and analyze the data and ultimately present the user with an overall compliance score. Today, GOJO is the global leader in hand-hygiene monitoring and has tens of thousands of devices in the field that are generating around two million events every day. Of course, they didn’t get to this point overnight.
Just like the questions you may be facing within your organization when it comes to product portfolio management, GOJO had to analyze many critical questions before they could confidently develop the necessary smart products. Let’s look at some of those questions that may be swimming around in your head.
Critical questions to consider.
- Where do I begin?
- Do we have the capabilities to tackle this?
- How do I visualize my plan?
- How do I connect our evolving technology needs?
- What are our options?
- What is the impact on work?
- How much is it going to cost?
- Do we have the resources to get this done?
Now, here’s the most important part: the answers. You may be thinking, sure I recognize those questions, but have no idea how to begin answering them.
Find out in the upcoming webcast, “Get Smart,” with Forrester and GOJO Industries, where experts Jeffrey Hammond (Forrester), April Bertram (GOJO Industries), and Carrie Nauyalis (Planview) will discuss industry trends, key organizational considerations in launching IoT products, and compelling case studies on how companies can successfully make the pivot from physical to digital products. You’ll walk away feeling confident in your answers to the above questions.
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