We are excited to introduce the Change Report into the Gocious product portfolio management solution.  The Change report is a feature that enables the comparison of product line plan versions and increments to gain visibility into what has changed from one to the other, with just a click of a button.

To meet your customers' demands as a discrete manufacturer, you need to create a product line with various products and options with many possible configurations. Designing your product line for your customers in a way that is not confusing and in the same time meets their personalization needs can be a challenge. Visualizing entire product lines is a way to ensure it is serving the market needs and is easy to understand from a customer's perspective. It is also an essential tool to strategically communicate what is being built and how it serves the market, enabling everyone inside the organization to stay aligned and informed.

There has been a recent change in the market, and you need to analyze your product line and plan a change to the current features and products immediately to address the market in 3 months.

Does this sound familiar? You're deep into a new product development process and heads down working on executing the product plan. Suddenly, you realize discrepancies in the products and feature definitions, the timelines to launch them, and their configurations. A myriad of spreadsheets, text documents, and presentation files stored in different places make it confusing to navigate as you are not sure what the latest approved decisions and definitions are. This means that now is the time to stop what you're doing and jump into the 'data scramble' and send a deluge of emails to product planning and product management teams to get the answers you need with a definitive picture of the product line.

Most hard goods manufacturers are embracing the digital transformation by focusing on their factory floor operations. They are spending millions and, on occasion, billions of dollars on upgrading equipment and streamlining processes. Often though, very little attention is given to the front-end of manufacturing. Why do manufacturers fail to extend their digital transformation to the early product definition, planning, and design stage?