speed up the management of innovation with Oracle Primavera Portfolio Managementglobal financial services support organisation

This organisation needed to capture, evaluate and manage the innovation process to enable a much shorter route to market. They sort to answer the following questions:

• Could an automated collection process be implemented while maintaining and encouraging organisational creativity?
• Would senior management agree to accept process automation as it would reduce the opportunity for lobbing?
• Could the approval processes be automated, so that if an approval was required the idea or project would “drop into the required approvers’ portfolio for action”?
• Would the move to an automated innovation evaluation process with increased transparency and data driven decisions stifle innovation itself?

This organisation saw many challenges and opportunities within its market and as a result they merged to form a stronger group – partly due to the ability to manage innovation better than others.

Innovation Previously

Service and product innovation has long been a key differentiator for this enterprise, by both its customers and competitors alike. Historically, the process of innovation management was manual, with ideas being collected from around the world in many different formats (spreadsheets, e-mail. PowerPoint, notes) and many different languages. There needed to be a smarter way to manage innovation.

Innovation Today

After the annual idea cut off, it was down to the innovation centre to tease important information from the submissions and capture the contents of these ideas in a standard document format. Having been worked up into coherent business propositions, these were presented to the global leadership team in a series of face to face meetings. Decision making saw management vote on each proposition until a prioritised ranking of ideas was agreed. Then at the end of this process the hard work of developing the idea started.

HPS worked with the global group responsible for managing innovation. We installed and deployed Oracle’s Primavera Portfolio Management product (OPPM), It supported the organisation in

• standardising the format and data collected on innovation across the globe
• providing a common basis for analysis, prioritisation and selection of development projects
• standardising the entire innovation process
• removed executive interference from the innovation process

This had the effect that:

• personnel entered their innovation ideas in the required format and could see them progress through the gated process – visibility
• on-entry data entry checking and “Alerts” would ensure that all required data was captured in the required but significantly shortened development time frames
• provide a collaborative tool that business users could configure, manage and maintain over the years to come was key to reducing total cost of ownership
• upon data entry, scorecards, dashboards and bubble charts started to report on the pending product and services portfolio
• investment assessment criteria are reviewed and changed annually depending on organisational strategy – ensuring that innovation investments are carefully targeted
• ranking, prioritisation and selection take account of in-flight and proposed ideas, and give the evidence to aggressively manage under-performing or misaligned innovation initiatives

Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management (OPPM) provided

• a single source of the truth for all innovation ideas
• it provided the standardisation of data input, evaluation, selection and reporting.
• it provided many other benefits, here what the customer said

“Today, the global leadership team is able to compress what was a long and arduous process with highly subjective decision making into a shortened period, where real-time decisions are taken by the senior leadership team“

“… the ease-of-use of the OPPM tool enables the innovation group to provide immediate responses to requests during meetings to create, develop and present new metrics to the decision-making body”

“The result is data driven investment, better use of senior leadership resources and shorter time to market for the innovations that flow from the process”