Case Study
Medical Device Division of $18B Multinational Personal Care Corporation Advances R&D Velocity and Strategic Value
$18M
Annualized EBITDA Improvement
Strategic Imperative
To accelerate R&D velocity and increase the strategic value of the product portfolio by focusing resources on the highest-value opportunities, compressing development cycle time, and improving the predictability and effectiveness of new-product development
Client Background
- Medical device division of a $18B multinational personal care corporation developing clinically differentiated products across multiple patient-care applications
- R&D portfolio included concurrent new-product development, product enhancement, sustaining-engineering, and regulatory initiatives competing for specialized technical resources
- Product development required coordination across engineering, clinical, regulatory, quality, operations, marketing, and commercial functions through interdependent development stages
- Competitive pressure and changing customer requirements increased the need to convert R&D investment into differentiated, launch-ready products more rapidly
- Leadership sought to concentrate scarce technical capacity on programs delivering the greatest strategic, clinical, and financial contribution to the portfolio
- Baseline performance was constrained by extended development cycles, inconsistent milestone attainment, fragmented prioritization, and limited portfolio-level resource and value visibility
Key Issues & Barriers
- Portfolio priorities shifted without consistent strategic-value and risk criteria, repeatedly redirecting technical capacity and extending timelines for high-priority programs
- Stage-gate requirements and decision rights varied across projects, allowing unresolved technical, clinical, and regulatory issues to migrate into later development stages
- Shared engineering, clinical, regulatory, and quality resources were committed without integrated capacity planning, creating bottlenecks across multiple critical-path programs
- New-product development and sustaining-engineering demands competed for the same specialist resources without sufficient visibility into portfolio-wide capacity constraints
- R&D reporting emphasized project activity and spending rather than milestone reliability, development velocity, critical-path risk, and expected portfolio value
- Cross-functional handoffs and escalation pathways were inconsistent, increasing decision latency and avoidable waiting time between critical development activities
Key Implementation Components
- Established portfolio-prioritization criteria incorporating strategic value, commercial potential, clinical differentiation, development risk, investment requirements, and time-to-value
- Designed and implemented a common product-development stage-gate process with defined deliverables, exit criteria, decision rights, and escalation thresholds.
- Developed integrated resource and capacity planning across engineering, clinical, regulatory, quality, operations, and other constrained specialist functions
- Implemented a System for Managing linking portfolio priorities, stage-gate commitments, resource allocation, critical risks, escalation, and executive accountability
- Introduced portfolio and project-level visibility into development cycle time, milestone adherence, resource loading, critical-path risks, and projected strategic value
- Established cross-functional resolution mechanisms to address design, regulatory, clinical, quality, and manufacturability constraints before they delayed downstream development
Benefits & Results
$18M
Annualized EBITDA Improvement
31%
Product Development Cycle-Time Reduction
26%
R&D Project Throughput Improvement