Download Montage and KeyedIn Find a Healthy Solution for Innovating Xtend

Montage and KeyedIn Find a Healthy Solution for Innovating Xtend-Life
Christchurch-based Xtend-Life Natural Products (Intl) Limited,
www.xtend-life.com is a natural health and skincare business that
has become an international leader in tough, competitive markets
over the past 15 years. But the creative energy needed for success
for the SME also requires the best possible management to ensure
the right priorities gain optimum results. Xtend-Life knew it needed
better information systems for not just the 30+ innovative projects it
has on the go at any one time but also for the way the entire
company worked. But how? They found the answers close to home
and internationally – Christchurch-based business intelligence
company Montage and its best-of-breed global partner, KeyedIn.
Scenario
Warren Matthews, a human dynamo who had been involved in businesses ranging from finance to
building ocean-going catamarans, had a life-changing moment in 1998. He was 51, fit and healthy but,
like so many men of his age, was getting up several times at night to go to the bathroom. Warren knew
he was at the start of an aging spiral and, unless he did something about it, he wouldn’t achieve
everything he wanted in life.
Sensing also an opportunity, he and his son, Lance, began researching natural health, mainly in the
United States. They were disappointed with what they found about supplements, although they learned
much about the industry. Then a British formulator, Prof A Munem Daoud, who had long experience in
multi-disciplinary areas developing pharmaceutical drugs as well as nutritional formulations, put them on
the right path.
Prof Daoud’s knowledge and support led to the development of first generation products for what Warren
called Total Balance in 2000 when Xtend-Life Natural Products started business.
Warren and his team have since built a large business of exclusive
and sophisticated formulas and numerous products for a growing
and well-informed international market.
It sets the highest standards. As Portfolio Manager Karen Pearce
says: “We source our ingredients from suppliers with whom we
have established solid relationships, and can be absolutely sure
about the quality of their products. We have a very sophisticated
Quality Assurance department and process. Every ingredient is
quality tested before we use it and every product is quality tested
before we send it out.”
All products are fully compliant with applicable standards and produced in the company’s state-of-the-art
multi-million dollar facility.
Manufacturing and distribution are registered with and
meet the US Food and Drug Administration’s requirements,
including its Good Manufacturing Practices for dietary
supplements.
Xtend-Life is fast paced and development projects keep the company thriving. But it needed a welldeveloped system to manage not only their delivery but also the 20 to 30 new ideas that are generated
on an almost daily basis.
New ideas are wonderful for growing a business. But it was a challenge for the team to focus on what
was required for the short, medium and long-term and which projects deserved the highest (or least)
priority in terms of value or needs for the business or customers.
The projects covered all aspects of the company, from
quickening delivery times to customers through Amazon
to ensuring its credit card practices were world class to
finding the knowledge and understanding for their
critically important website.
More than 30 projects can be on the go at once, and
this work comes on top of the daily workload for about
45 staff which includes teams for Customer Relations,
Production, QA, Finance, Supply Chain, New Product
Development and Project Management.
Xtend-Life knew it would find optimum value for all its work if it had a robust means of managing its
projects.
The Solution
Karen was brought on as Portfolio Manager in October 2014. She found information beneath the project
work to determine priorities and needs was too difficult to gain. The collaboration tool being used
allowed collaboration but not planning.
“When we started a project, we couldn’t see how long it would take, who needed to be involved and
what kind of conversations needed to take place around resource priorities.”
She worked with the exec team to understand the requirements for key decision-making and alignment
to strategy before looking at available portfolio management tools.
“We are a SME organisation so we needed something that fitted us and was appropriate to our size but
which could be scalable because we will continue to grow.”
One of three companies considered was KeyedIn
Solutions, a company headquartered in the US, with
offices in Britain. Their cloud-based project and portfolio
management software allows all aspects of every
project to be viewed from a single platform which is
powerful yet easy to use and can be implemented
rapidly.
We needed something that
fitted us and was appropriate
to our size but which could be
scalable because we will
continue to grow.
Xtend-Life had looked at KeyedIn previously. But it was
then supported from the UK, a 12-hour time zone
difference to New Zealand. Fortunately, in the meantime, KeyedIn had taken on an Australasian channel
partnership with Montage in Christchurch.
“KeyedIn has vast global knowledge, highly-developed implementation skills and a best of breed
solution. We knew Montage could tap into KeyedIn’s global excellence and combine that with Montage’s
experience to meet our New Zealand and Australian based clients’ needs.” Said Duncan Turner, Montage
Principal Consultant for Project Management.
Says Karen: “It was really the relationship Duncan and I developed in understanding what needed to
happen for Xtend-Life that sold it for me.” She explained to her own board the benefits, costs and what
the world would look like when using such a solution. The board listened and gave her work high
priority.
Together they then began to detail what Karen wanted to achieve - understanding the pipeline of project
work and visibility for every project, capturing and prioritising that and resourcing it effectively.
“Then Duncan and I worked through the system, how we could use and configure it to do what we
wanted to do. It was a real partnership,” Karen says.
Montage led the project and KeyedIn built the
configuration and answered the more technical
questions. Xtend-Life also partnered with an
experienced Business Analyst to assist with developing
processes and how best to utilise the system. They
kept the configuration simple, yet open to grow with
their emerging capability. This was a feature which had
attracted the company to KeyedIn in the first place.
It was a real partnership.
Progress was swift. “I (first) met with Montage in late November,” Karen said. “By March, we had a
system that was configured to the way we needed and it was pretty much our sandpit environment.”
A great benefit was gathering information in day-time New Zealand and sending it to KeyedIn in Britain
overnight ready for the next steps the following morning. Montage and KeyedIn answered any queries
quickly.
At the same time, Xtend-Life planned to use Agile
techniques, which KeyedIn would support, setting up
two-week “sprints” for project work. Portions of a
project and benefits were delivered in a shorter time as
the project progressed. This also meant changing work
habits using visual management - placing tasks in
ordered columns, bringing teams together regularly to
report progress, deciding continually on priorities,
resources and obstacles, and controlling the process to
completion.
Training using an outside consultant was a large part of the staff change process, from top to bottom,
bringing into effect a whole new way of working.
“It’s usual for a cross-functional team who plan their two weeks of work to know, at the end, what it’s
going to look like and that it will be useful. If there’s a change, we can incorporate it into the next two
weeks,” said Karen.
Karen’s experience told her such a massive cultural change doesn’t happen overnight. One way to help
was to have 15-minute standups every second day in a room where all projects and other information
are listed in columns around the walls.
“The beauty of the standup is that there are three questions to be answered. ‘What have I done, what
am I going to do and what are my impediments?’ The third is where the value is built is because, more
often than not, someone will say ‘I’ve done that before so I can work with you on that and we can do
that together.’ ”
Montage supported this change: “We implemented KeyedIn Projects to be simple and fit for purpose to
their context, we have automated status reporting and other project processes and have given a
standardised way of measuring and managing projects, such as a common lifecycle that all projects
follow.” Said Duncan.
By June 2015, it went live.
Results
The change has been positive.
“It’s all about continuous improvement,” Karen said. “There’s visibility. We can see the whole process
and understand what happened along the way, and there isn’t a culture of blame.”
Duncan is also proud of what has been achieved. “They
have transparency of their projects and know how they
are performing; and are able to make decisions based
on facts,” he said.
There will be further adjustments in future and there’s
still much to be learned. But the benefits are huge.
Because KeyedIn is in the cloud, and with staff
travelling the world constantly, it’s accessible to anyone
so they’re aware.
They have transparency of their
projects and know how they
are performing; and are able to
make decisions based on facts.
Says Karen: “This is brilliant. I’ve really enjoyed it personally. From a business perspective, it’s definitely
been the right thing to do. We’re starting to see the benefits of it now, and there’ll be more and more as
we go along.”