Marks & Spencer aligns its Product Lifecycle Management process for swift, big-bang launches.

When trans fats first made headlines as a potential health risk, U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) was quick to respond with a massive assault down virtually every aisle. Within a year, M&S redesigned, developed, packaged and launched more than 1,200 new or reformulated trans fat-free items.


M&S, with 520 stores in the United Kingdom and 280 internationally, sells exclusively store brand products, which gives the $16.8-billion retailer complete control over every aspect of every product it sells. M&S competes in the most competitive private label market in the world. At U.K.-based grocery heavyweights such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s, private label goods account for more than 50 percent of sales, and the numbers continue to grow.

So how can a 4,500-items-per-store retailer out-maneuver the giants for market share?

What M&S lacks in size, it easily makes up for in agility. M&S recently adopted a new product lifecycle management (PLM) process supported by a new collaboration and data management solution to help it quickly embrace emerging consumer trends and bring a wide range of products to market quickly.

As a result, by rapidly addressing trends in wellness, taste and diversity, M&S has elevated its status as a market innovator and champion on behalf of its shoppers.

What’s more, the company has successfully converted this customer praise into profitable growth — M&S food sales increased 10 percent last year.

“M&S has always been a leading innovator, but three years back we were starting to lose ground against our major competitors,” says Fiona Moore, head of product development and packaging for M&S. “Today, we’re viewed as champions of innovation by our customers. When we make product decisions, they are grand in scale, swift to market and heavily promoted. The customer cannot help but admire our passion to meet their needs.”

The overall objective of the PLM redesign was to build the capability to launch more massive-scale product assortments that address growing trends or new customer demands. A more top-down approach to product development was to replace a traditional, category-level management strategy, whereby each category develops its own priorities and launch schedules and runs as an independent group.

With the new top-down approach in place, M&S product launches are now big and bold and get the consumer’s attention like no other retailer in the United Kingdom. In a single day, the retailer can launch hundreds of products across all of its locations. And the new products all address an important customer demand, such as organic goods, lower sodium, or a holiday celebration such as Mother’s Day.

Enabling Big Ideas with Scale

As part of its program to support a “big-bang” approach, M&S now stages its massive launches 12 times a year. One day each month, all new products must be ready to shelf, promote and scan. According to Moore, there’s simply no room for error as the complete development schedule is tightly managed to align with the definitive launch date.

Moore also introduced a highly collaborative system to smooth out any rough edges as the company rolls out hundreds of new products a month. Key to the PLM redesign, Moore adopted a “stage-gate” development process that includes more structured workflows, requirements, decision points and activities as products move through the development and introduction process.

To support this structured flow, Moore centralized all product information and made it more searchable and accessible. Previously, data was stored on individual PCs, in disparate applications, such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. This structure makes data hard to find, inconsistent to use and difficult to reconcile.

To support its increased needs for data and the structured PLM process, M&S implemented a collaboration and data-management solution for private label goods from Agentrics, an Alexandria, Va.-based company that serves as an agent for the retail and consumer-goods industry to optimize shared business processes among trading partners.

“Our new PLM system helps us stay a half-step ahead of customer demands by providing a common product-development platform and shared database that connects every step of the process and fuels all collaborations,” Moore says.

The new system provides a common platform so Moore can tightly integrate the team with its supplier network. All parties can now manage and work on projects more collaboratively. M&S views its suppliers and service providers as teammates. Everyone is integral to the process. Thus, it was important to offer these partners, such as package designers, visibility into the system and the ability to enter data, manage projects and share issues.

All combined, the new, more collaborative process and system helped to reduce the complexities of working with more products and projects simultaneously.

“With the new system in place, we can manage more new products in development,” she says. “In a given year, we might launch 1,000 entirely new products, which represents more than 20 percent of our product portfolio. This is remarkable when you consider we are a retailer and do not manufacture anything ourselves. We rely heavily on supplier cooperation and collaboration — possibly to a greater extent then any other retailer.”

M&S has enjoyed a significant payback from the redesign. The new process and system have brought tremendous efficiencies. While the number of products and projects has increased, the relative size of the product development team has not.

The new system eliminated redundant work and allows Moore to more easily restructure the group to best leverage people’s talents.

The success rate of new product introductions also has climbed.

“Generally speaking, new products in this industry have, at best, a 1-in-3 chance of success. With the more structured process and through greater collaboration we have significantly increased those odds,” she adds.

In private label foods, striving to be first-to-market with new product formulations poses many challenges — especially when dealing with so much data across the team and supplier network. For example, complete all-in-one ready meals have very complex ingredients lists. Today, ingredients lists are built automatically from data entered during the recipe and supplier entry stages.

Moore adds, “The comprehensive nature of the ingredients database allows us to keep our eyes more on our customers than competitors, so we can be more strategic in planning and launching products. That way, we’re first-to-market with goods that drive traffic, loyalty and profits. Since we control our own destiny, our culture is not based on competitive reactions. We can be proactive on behalf of our customers.

Building a Can-Do Atmosphere

M&S calls its PLM system the Food Innovation Database, or FIND. FIND includes all of the teamwork templates, process flows and serves as the centralized repository for all information, such as product specifications, ingredient information, packaging requirements and supplier data.

“As an added benefit, the new system has helped us build a more powerful can-do atmosphere,” she says. “There are much more vibrant discussions, decisions are made more quickly and people work as partners. The system has brought all of our people closer together, from product development to merchandising to technology to suppliers.”

FIND supports M&S’ stage-gate PLM process and collects all information as users input information and as decisions are made along the way.

Product teams initiate a development process by writing a “range brief,” which describes the overall goal, customer demands and products under consideration. Once approved, the information in the range brief fuels individual product briefs. As a result, all briefs are completely aligned as the products and launch plans come together simultaneously.

FIND also facilitates collaborations around real-time work flows, visibility into on-going activities, as well as shared data access. All users have message inboxes and can access online planning tools to help direct activities. Once a user completes an activity, the system automatically tells them what to do next.

Aligning Data for Strategic Access

Data has not always been this easy to access and use across the team.

In the former processes, Moore found there were multiple versions of supplier lists. Product records were kept in disparate places, sometimes across several categories. Information on discontinued products, proper UPC codes and new product information was not just a click away. This lack of centralized data made it difficult for product developers to ensure that information was accurate and timely.

And, now more than ever, in food retailing, timely access to accurate information is critical in the event of a food safety issue.

M&S prides itself in being a world leader in food safety and corporate social responsibility. Earlier this year, the retailer launched a corporate initiative called “Plan A” to link its business strategy to these issues. The new PLM system supports Plan A as it enables the recording of every attribute of every product from every supplier. And any information can be quickly accessed.

“If we need to review supplier compliance to our Plan A objectives, we can track and trace that data all the way to our suppliers’ suppliers in minutes,” says David Gregory, M&S technical director of foods. “With our old system, it was a true challenge to manage critical areas such as food safety and recalls,” he adds.

“Today, if we have an industry-wide food scare, within an hour we can trace the questionable ingredient or supplier to every product and quickly pull items from the shelves,” he says. “Before, this process could have lasted a lot longer and would have required countless hours of effort.”

M&S also uses a supplier auditing tool from United Kingdom-based Muddy Boots Software to perform remote field audits of suppliers. These audits ensure that suppliers are complying with M&S food safety and Plan A standards.

According to Gregory, the Muddy Boots system and the traceabilility features in the Agentrics solution allow M&S to better manage suppliers and ingredients to reduce risks associated with food safety.

Building Accountability

The FIND system also provides more advanced features to build metrics and measure performance, which helps keep the M&S team focused.

“We can now measure our activity levels and the status of each action, as well as any missed deadlines or incomplete projects,” she says. “We have complete top-down visibility and control across a complete range. We can view all launches in progress. Every member, including our senior executive team, can see the process of our development activities.”

She adds, “No matter how you try to simplify the product development and launch process, it will always be challenging and complex. From developing and managing recipes, legalities, safety and labels, it’s an enormously complex process.

“Our new approach and FIND system has truly positioned M&S as a champion of innovation. We now have the tools and processes to continue to stay a half-step ahead of our customers and keep them, as well as our employees, partners and shareholders, happy.”