How Alcon improves its time to market

My name is Derek Jessup and I am the Director of PPM systems and Process Excellence at Alcon Laboratories. Alcon is the global leader in eye care and we produce products that help people's vision. That can range from anything from a contact lens to surgical equipment to replacing a lens in your eyeball. So we touch over 285 million people annually. What is your role at Alcon? (00:31 to 01:08) My role at Alcon is split into two phases. One being the Process Excellence owner, which basically means that we want to ensure that we have processes in place where we can consistently do portfolio management, project management and resource management across the company. My second part is really being the PPM System owner, which allows us to utilize the tool to support the process that we have and not have the tool dictate how we do our business. So, our processes come first and then the tool is second. What are the key challenges in your industry? (01:09 to 01:37) As a medical device company, some of the key challenges that we face in our industry is really just getting the products to the market quick. So everybody is innovating and where since we're the global leader in eye care, we need to maintain our presence. And so we just have to reduce the time to get there but also the cost to get there. How has Planisware benefited your company? (01:38 to 03:05) Planisware has benefited us in being able to challenge our assumptions. So we initially during our implementation created project templates and those templates were based on the normal process to develop the product that we were thinking of. And through the course of time, by utilizing that template and having project actuals placed in the projects, we're able to go back and validate the assumptions in that template and challenge the validity of the duration, the cost and the resources associated with that template. And by doing so, we've been able to reduce what we thought was a development time of greater than a thousand days to about 350 days. Using Planisware and having all the projects in one system, having all the costs in one system, we were able to meet a challenge of a budget reduction without impacting the ultimate goals of the project. So without delaying any milestone, we were able to achieve our cost reduction by determining what activities were on the critical path, what spend was on the critical path and basically labeling those as those can't change. Anything else that was not on the critical path, we had the potential to delay. So we were able to delay some activities without having to cancel projects, without having to delay projects and meeting the constraint that was put in place, but never impacting the project itself. How does Alcon use Planisware? (03:06 to 04:12) Alcon uses Planisware for basically the starting point was if an R&D associate was working on something, that project was in Planisware. So initially our thought was new product development but it is expanded from there. So it includes things from basic research to post-market support activities, phase four studies, alliance management and organizational capabilities. It really starts at the top of the company with our executive leadership team. Those individuals really keep asking us, "What is the value that I get from the budget that we give you annually?" So what is the value of our portfolio at any given time? Beyond them it's really the R&D leadership team. They need to know what are the milestones? What are the objectives annually? What are the objectives that we're going to hit over our strategic horizon? So we utilize Planisware to answer those questions. Another layer in the organization is really the project teams. They utilize Planisware to be able to execute the projects as they have been approved through our governance model. What kind of decisions are being driven from the tool? (04:13 to 05:45) The types of decisions that are being addressed from the data we have in Planisware surround strategy, portfolio prioritization, collection of an annual budget, collection of strategic plans. What is the long range forecast? What does the long range plan look like for the number of product launches we're going to have? Submissions approvals across all the projects that we have in the system. It's really just anything happening in R&D, we're able to address through the use of Planisware. And being able to show from data in the system how a project is going to affect a budget, the strategic plan, our corporate initiatives, being able to use the data to help drive those decisions. Some of those are based on hiring decisions. So we have all of our projects in the tool itself and we plan all the resources that are on those projects. And we're able to make assessments of where we're going to have constraints in the future. And we're able to justify hiring of new associates or contractors to support those projects going forward. We've also been able to support our financial process to generate an annual project budget from the tool, from a bottoms up perspective. And being able to track that budget very closely. So we have a very tight margin of a plus one to minus 3% tolerance variation from our budget. And we're able to meet that by utilizing the capabilities that Planisware has offered us. How has Planisware impacted your Processes? (05:46 to 06:14) We moved from a distributed model where people had files on their personal computers to a consolidated single source of information. That information includes project schedules, project costs, internal resources as well as external resources, as well as interfacing with our financial ventures so that we can have a closed loop process from a plan perspective to an actual perspective. What is your favourite thing about working with Planisware? (06:15 to 08:02) The best part about working with Planisware is just simply the people that Planisware hires. We've had many consultants associated with Alcon over the years and there's not one that we would say was not good. They're all amazing people. And they're really invested in the success of Alcon being able to utilize Planisware. And it's not just a sale or a number but it's really, that they're invested in the outcome. One of the other unique thing is really the Planisware user conference. The CEO of the company is there. He makes himself available to understand what your business's needs are and really implement those needs into the tool if they make sense. And so he is very open to just dialogue and it's amazing. I've never seen it in another company. The day before the conference starts, there is a face-to-face meeting called the best practice working group. And that group is made up of many representatives across the life sciences industry. Most recently they've decided to have a second best practices working group for basically non-pharma related companies. So those groups are quite interesting and unique because I've never been in a situation where a company shares how they do business. And the best practices working group that's really the conversations that occur. How we do business and how it relates to Planisware and how Planisware supports our business needs. It's a very open, very honest and very candid conversations from what could be your competitors.