Wash, Rinse, Repeat Your NPD with PBS & Asana Templates

Established in 1984, Professional Beauty Systems (PBS) is a UK based industry leader in the development and manufacturing of high-quality beauty, skincare, and haircare products for world-leading brands. In addition, the company also has a comprehensive and continually growing portfolio of professional brands including OSMO, Crazy Color and Kaeso. 

When Vanguard was first introduced to PBS, NPD processes were managed via email, spreadsheets, trackers and face to face meetings and the scale of growth was making these traditional methods no longer fit for purpose. Teams such as NPD (New Product Development), Client Services, and the Laboratory team worked independently, data was duplicated and there was no centralised project status. As the company continued to grow across all teams it was increasingly difficult for senior management to readily obtain a high-level overview to monitor progress and identify risks. 

The first team to onboard Asana was the New Product Development team as their process is at the company's core. We began by templatising as much as possible, creating a template for Private Label products and one for In House Brands as the product development process for each product worked with slightly different processes. 

These templates outline the tasks start to finish for every new product being created from brief to artwork, to packaging and process. We implemented standardised milestones in these templates to ensure stage gates were tracked. These milestones also to roll up to the portfolio level to provide a high-level view of progress of all New Products.

We also curated an initial briefing form that captured key information for reference through the entire process such as formulation and packaging requirements, launch timings, target cost and intended countries of sale.  

Historically there would have been separate briefing process to the internal teams but by building the form into the new product templates in this way, we could trigger an automation to multihome this initial brief into a ‘Stability Board, and Regs Boards’ (owned by the Lab team). These two board view projects are to make sure ingredient testing and customer feedback on formulation happens in a standardised with all the information from the brief. These process board projects and the NPD template have the same custom field called ‘Lab stage’ giving visibility to the NPD team as to the lab's progress.

Once this new way of working was implemented and the benefits clear to all parties we then focused on using the managed service hours to build a Client Services Team Template and Portfolio. The template we set up was for visits, reviews and reminders to check in with the clients, but with three variations for the different client ‘tiers’ requiring different levels of support.

In addition, we created dedicated client portfolios that hosted the NPD projects as well as the Client Services Project, so that they can easily see which products are in development or recently completed, giving them advanced information for those important meetings.

By bringing these processes together in Asana, PBS has moved from spreadsheets, emails and siloed teams to a more connected and scalable way of working. Templates, forms, automations, milestones and portfolios now provide consistency across the NPD and Client Services teams, while giving leadership the visibility they need across the wider business. 

Elli MacDonough, New Product Development Manager

“From the kick-off meeting, it was clear that Vanguard’s in-depth knowledge of Asana’s capabilities and experience in developing processes for other manufacturing companies would be invaluable in helping PBS make progress at pace.

Danni played a key role in bringing Asana to life across the business, demonstrating to our teams how the platform could not only help them manage their individual workloads more effectively, but also how new ways of working would streamline and accelerate the NPD process across the business.”

Most importantly, the foundations for PBS are now in place to wash, rinse and repeat — making it easier to launch new products, manage client relationships and scale successful processes as PBS continues to grow.