Development Of New Products In The Food Industry With The Incorporation Of Agile Techniques

Irma De Toni Berger, R&D And Quality Director At Alfonzo Rivas & Cia

For many years, developing new products in the food industry followed a waterfall project scheme in which a project is divided into phases, with one phase having to be completed to move on to the next.

The process was designed with a Gantt with specific activities and times. When the product development team received a new proposal from the marketing area, the pre-established Gantt was simply used for the different types of projects (new product, reformulation, new packaging, new product with incorporation of new production lines, change design, among others), establishing a work plan with a launch date established by the Gantt.

The stages contemplated in this process were:

1. Carry out the technical-economic evaluation of the new project

2. Design the prototype

3. Carry out the launch and first production

 4. Apply continuous improvement of the new product

In total, 35 stages were established with an estimated launch time of one year, with 18 formats that had to be authorized by the different levels of the organization to launch the new product.

 It was a robust process with a lot of control, where errors were minimized but simultaneously rigid, with times not in line with market expectations, bureaucratic and did not stimulate innovation.

 In a changing world, the food industry must be able to capture opportunities at the moment; managing waterfall projects does not offer real value promptly; it hinders companies' ability to respond to customer needs and market conditions.

This make us question our development methodology, which is why we considered incorporating agile techniques in the new product development process.

We understood that agility focuses on the value created, the first paradigm we face, and that what is important is not the number of projects managed or the number of products launched on the market.

Rather, those projects are important because of the value that they generate for the client; this allows us to relocate the team and resources to those projects that generate the greatest value.

Then, the flow of the innovation process was reviewed with the value stream map (VSM) methodology, an agile methodology that increases customer value by eliminating waste from the process. This allowed us to improve our development process by eliminating stages that do not add value; we evaluated waiting times and how to improve these times. The development process had 5,350 minutes, of which 78% were waiting times, so the team focused on improving these waiting times by reducing the total time by 50% to provide results more quickly.

We also incorporated the concept of MVP: launching a minimally viable product that allowed us to measure the consumer's impressions and be able to incorporate these insights into the design of the product and improve the MVP until we had the final product desirable by the client and the company, reducing the time to market in up to 6 months.

The request for a new product was changed to the user story, which is the description of the client's needs. The Gantt fixed a backlog of specific project activities that focuses the team on which tasks must be completed first so that the project progresses. Weekly or biweekly monitoring was incorporated into the sprints, as well as retrospective meetings that allowed us to incorporate improvements.

"We are currently incorporating design thinking to find innovative ideas and creative solutions to satisfy our consumers' needs and continue innovating in the market"

The Kanban methodology was incorporated to manage the project, for which Zoho projects software was implemented. This software offers real-time information about the activities carried out, those that are pending, and those that will soon be carried out.

Besides improving time to market, the incorporation of agile techniques into the new product development process has impacted the teams' creativity by proposing innovative solutions to advance project stages that may be delayed. All this is achieved thanks to the agile principles that are known by the manufacturing, quality, R&D, regulatory, supply, projects, marketing, and suppliers' teams.

During this process, we had the advice of Prozess Group, who trained the team in the different agile methodologies to choose the ones that best adapted to our philosophy and process.

We are currently incorporating design thinking to find innovative ideas and creative solutions to satisfy our consumers' needs and continue innovating in the market.