Wrike Aims to Help Manufacturers Improve their New Product Development (NPD) Process Performance
We had a unique opportunity to catch up with some old friends with significant experience supporting product design and development for the manufacturing industries. They have worked with solutions like Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) in the past and they recognize the strengths, and the weaknesses, of these solutions. They want to brief us because they see a significant opportunity to complement traditional solutions with Wrike’s leading work management solution.
What Wrike Does – Collaborative Work Management
Beyond this conversation, we were also able to attend their virtual conference, Wrike Collaborate, to understand how Wrike delivers value to their customers. The virtual conference shared numerous examples of how their customers get better control of their processes through formal work management. Not all of their customers are manufacturers because Wrike’s solution is generally applicable across industries. From what we’ve seen, it can probably help companies improve their process performance – and results – in any industry.
Collaborative Work Management (CWM) is a software category that complements other solutions such as PLM, ERP, CRM, and countless others. It does this by helping companies orchestrate and analyze work. As Wrike Chief Product Officer Alexey Korotich explained during the Collaborate event, Wrike’s CWM is “the connective tissue for work.” Wrike further explained that the scope of their solution helps companies:
- Plan & Align Resources
- Execute the Work
- Report & Analyze Progress
Wrike allows companies to do this by operationalizing the way they manage tasks, project timelines, forms, and more. They provide lightweight control and coordination of workflows, data management, and collaboration to improve processes that are typically managed in spreadsheets, emails, cloud file sharing platforms, and other informal and contextually unaware tools. Their reported strengths are the solution’s ability to operate at scale and the flexibility and configurability of their platform.
Wrike’s Strategy – Work Intelligence
A key message delivered at Wrike Collaborate was around “work intelligence.” As CMO Christine Royston explained, they want their customers to “do less and achieve more” as opposed to the traditional approach to “do more with less.” Her point is that companies should be able to focus on more impactful work and concentrate on what matters while automating repetitive tasks with artificial intelligence (#AI).
To support this, Wrike is expanding the mission of their core platform to support Work Intelligence. The strategy is to help their customers streamline work with AI by automating workflows, including the use of AI agents that can be trained to perform tasks. These agents, or “workmates,” can capture decisions and draw context from other applications like instant messaging, productivity tools, and more. The strategy also includes copilots to provide contextual assistance to users as they perform their tasks.
Focus on the Manufacturing Industries
Despite Wrike’s cross-industry appeal, they believe that the manufacturing industries provide them with a growth opportunity. They currently have a foothold in the industry because they already work with manufacturing companies, mostly supporting their marketing creative and content management, marketing campaigns. In fact, Wrike counts major manufacturers including Siemens, JLR, Google Fitbit, Electrolux, and Schneider Electric as customers.
At Wrike Collaborate, we also heard from two manufacturers that use Wrike for more product-centric processes. We heard from Michael Fank, the Quality Manager from Wisconsin Metal Parts, about their use of Wrike for continuous improvement and quality management processes including APQP and CAPA. He explained that using the platform helps them save time, which he calls their “most precious resource.”
We also heard from Jeff Greenberg, founder and President of The Kitchen Coop. He explained how they use Wrike for onboarding #NPD projects, including capturing information including ingredients, recipes, and packaging across the different people that hold that critical information. Then, they manage customer order reviews, approvals, accounting, and track through production. He said this is much more effective than managing through threads of email, and also allows customers to see the status of their orders as they develop.
Supporting NPD
Wrike is aiming to do more in the manufacturing industries by taking advantage of their strength in cross-departmental workflows. NPD is an inherently collaborative process, requiring input, feedback, and coordination across multiple departments and the supply chain. This creates an opportunity for Wrike to continue to support marketing workflows or expand to the program management office (PMO) to support product development approval processes, stages and gates, and other collaborative processes that inherently involve numerous people outside of engineering. Wrike is targeting NPD because later engineering and product release processes require more rigid, formal revision control, change management, and release to manufacturing processes that are built into most PLM systems. The early part of NPD, on the other hand, is often less formalized and commonly supported by emails and spreadsheets.
Wrike aims to complement PLM systems that take over during the more formally structured design phase of the product lifecycle. We believe there may also be an opportunity to provide support beyond those early stages for manufacturers that aren’t managing NPD processes in PLM. Wrike could also sit alongside PLM and ERP as a system of engagement to support the enterprise and the supply chain throughout the product lifecycle.
Why It’s Important
Our research shows that manufacturers miss NPD deadlines way too often. This is a big issue because rapid time to market is key to product success, driving higher market share and profit margins. Wrike is offering manufacturers a way to perform better, more consistently, and faster so they can better capture market opportunities by getting better products to market. If Wrike can help improve the effectiveness of NPD, they will provide significant business value beyond just improving operational efficiency.
Our Take
Wrike offers a compelling opportunity for manufacturers, especially those that may already use their solution in other aspects of their business, such as manufacturers that already use Wrike to manage their marketing campaigns or customer service. Wrike’s CWM can add a layer of process orchestration on top of existing PLM implementations. We also believe there is a lot of opportunity for them to integrate with PLM systems to gather, manage, and analyze project-oriented NPD data in the NPD project context. Wrike could potentially even sit on top of existing systems like PLM, ERP, CRM, and others to pull information and processes together in the NPD context similar to what we call the “Industrial System of Engagement,” or SOE. Adding AI agents and copilot technology makes this value proposition even more attractive.
Improving NPD provides an attractive opportunity for improvement that can directly impact company performance and profitability. We are excited to see how the offering is received by manufacturers.
Thank You
Thank you Richard Blatcher, James Eckmier, and Susan Tonkin for introducing us to Wrike and sharing your plans for the manufacturing industry. We’re excited to stay in touch and keep track of your progress in supporting manufacturing product design and development processes.
Also thank you to Anna Grigoryan, Jessica Wooding, and Matt Allen for your support and to CEO Thomas Scott, CPO Alexey Korotich, and CMO Christine Royston for their information presentations at Wrike Collaborate.