Product Portfolio Management
Build a competitive product portfolio consisting of product lines, categories and product variants using the Product Portfolio Management template. Manage the whole lifecycle of your products end to end: from ideation through development and launch up to withdrawal from market. Define target milestones for these stages to make sure to meet your timeline. Make use of standard Checklists to ensure that your products transition to their next status in time and with required deliverables. Capture the complete product specification in a single location and make it available to all stakeholders in real time. Furthermore, integrate the product with other business processes data like New Product Introduction / Development and Change Management managed in the same platform for a maximum of efficiency.
This template is ready to use and not only enables to manage single products, but the whole portfolio by organizing Products within Product Lines, Product Categories and Portfolios. All entities also enable to manage information required by product catalogs that may receive information from these workspaces (e.g. images and marketing text).
This template can be used together with the New Product Introduction template to link the product master record with the given development project and vice versa. To achieve this, please download the given template and set the given linking picklist fields in both directions.
Products
The Products workspace is used to capture all product related information including specification, documentation, milestone information, product classification, bill of materials, review information, project references and others. Any kind of documentation can be managed within the product’s Attachments tab.
This template also manages the lifecycle of a product, enabling to capture ideas for new products to be compared against other alternatives before selecting and developing the given product. All activities for a successful product launch and product maintenance are supported as well by given states in the product lifecycle.
Checklists and checklist templates
A product can only proceed along its lifecycle if criteria defined in related checklists are met. These checklists ensure that required deliverables are provided and that given activities are completed.
Such checklists can be defined dynamically in Checklist Templates to meet the given business process needs. This enables to define different criteria for new product developments than for product variants and product updates for example.
Product lines
Products can be grouped in Product Lines to define a consistent naming schema and also to define standard responsibilities and milestone schedule.
As products get added to the line, Product Managers can easily track the progression of these products on Product Line level and review the impact of these new products on the line.
Product categories
This root level of the product portfolio enables to group multiple Product Lines within one category. The Product Categories do not drive any specific business logic but help in managing a broad product portfolio.
Product Categories provide identical reports as the Product Lines – but across multiple groups. This makes it easy to track all changes to the portfolio across multiple lines with a single click.
