The vital endeavour of new product development (NPD) is highly complex and necessitates the active involvement of a number of different departments. That makes having a unified database to serve as an organisation-wide system of record for critical information a key priority—especially in the fast-moving and trend-driven process manufacturing industries of food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics.

One of the most challenging aspects of new product development (NPD) is the fact that so many of your employees across multiple departments must be on board and empowered with the right tools to make their contributions to the project. Succeeding on this front requires keeping everyone engaged, informed and equipped so that they can move in lock-step toward an optimized end result.

Spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel, are extensively used in the corporate and manufacturing world for maintaining contact information, making calculations and developing dashboards and comparison charts of large amounts of raw data. But if you need to share real-time information and inject collaboration into your activities, spreadsheets are simply not enough.