Problem

The client, a leading brand in the women’s handbags and accessories industry segment, wanted to improve the success of its NPD (New product development). The client often introduced new designs in the market but only a handful would get desired full-price sell-through. The client wanted to turn this around.

Solution

The client had a large retail footprint across regions and towns. This distribution served well to form a representative sample set of POS to test new products.

Client’s production team carved out a small-scale sampling facility that would produce a small batch of new designs, which got placed in the representative sample set of POS.

We then trained the client’s Design team to track item ROS (rate of sale) of the new designs, which could be extrapolated with weightages attached to the universal spread of POS and the launch month, to determine the production lot size to be made in each new design.

Two lines in Manufacturing facility were kept reserved as ‘green channels’ to increase the speed-to-market for new products that received promising consumer acceptance. The raw material was available and production lead times were crashed by controlling the regular WIP release.

The production lot size of tested, new products also determined their further distribution. As certain POS were ruled out, based on the earlier observations on new products’ performance.

Outcome

The success rate of new products multiplied as the client could curtail over-production of items that did not fetch the desirable response from the market.