How Supergoop leveraged Al to bring clarity and efficiency to their commercialization process
Supergoop is a fast-growing CPG company that has taken a new approach to skincare, by making SPF fun and easy to wear. It integrates sunscreen into a wide range of skincare and beauty essentials, ensuring that each product is highly personalized to suit different skin types and lifestyles.
The Challenge
Bringing clarity and efficiency to the commercialization process
Like many fast-growing organizations, Supergoop was so focused on execution that documentation of their commercialization process fell behind. Getting a clear, complete picture of the process - including an accurate understanding of each step, the time it takes to execute, and diagnosing why breakdowns and bottlenecks happen - was a big challenge.
Specifically, the company was using a workflow management platform to track tasks, and so each team understood their own specific assignments. However, the lack of a documented overall process meant teams and departments were operating in silos, and had no visibility into how their work affected other departments in the commercialization value chain. This led to inconsistent handoffs, unclear areas of responsibility, bottlenecks, and missed deadlines and improvement opportunities.
At this point, the standard approach would be either to hire an external consultant, and/or hold an offsite strategy event with key stakeholders to map out the processes - but both of these approaches come with their own logistical challenges and costs.
The Solution
Sugarwork
That's where Sugarwork came in. Supergoop partnered with Sugarwork, a platform that captures tacit knowledge and uses Al to deliver outputs in formats that are immediately useful to the organization. Unlike traditional process management tools that focus on individual steps, Sugarwork is able to provide an overview of the entire process, identifying pain points and areas for improvement.
The Process
How Supergoop worked with Sugarwork
To kick off the project, supergoop's Commercialization Manager used Sugarwork's research-based customized discussion guides to conduct a series of interviews with key stakeholders from each department. Over the course of 2.5 weeks, seven one-hour discussions were held over Zoom and recorded in the Sugarwork platform.
The platform then utilized Al to analyze the information from the interviews and generate a series of tools and documents. The result was a comprehensive overview and documentation of Supergoop's commercialization process, complete with:
Process overviews, including a step-by-step outline of the commercialization process, with feedback from all departments.
A process mapping visualization, to highlight pain points, conflicting opinions, and areas that needed improvement.
RACI documents to clearly define roles and responsibilities for each team, ensuring that everyone understood their part in the process.
Checklists outlining what each team needs to do, when, for whom, and how it impacts other departments.
"Sugarwork filled a gap in our toolbox that workflow management tools don't cover, with relatively low effort. The outputs were a game-changer, generating quickly what would have taken hours or days, and providing out-of-the box documentation that we could leverage immediately."
Jeannie Barnes, Commercialization Manager, Supergoop
The Result
A streamlined commercialization process that unlocked productivity
Supergoop was able to evaluate their commercialization process with a complete end-toend overview generated by Sugarwork at a much lower cost and with far greater speed than any manual initiative. The process maps and checklists ensure that every department and team along the value chain has a clear understanding of the overall process, what their role is, and how it impacts others, and the RACI documents reduce the likelihood of missed deadlines and ensure smoother handoffs between teams.
The result is a more cohesive, well-organized approach to bringing new products to market, enabling the company to address pain points, reduce inefficiencies and improve collaboration.
"Sugarwork enabled us to achieve in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost everything we could have done with an external consultant. And better still, we can leverage the solution for any process mapping and documentation on an as-needed basis, whether to update our commercialization or other cross-departmental processes, or even within individual departments themselves."
Ryan Crowley, CFO & COO, Supergoop
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