One of Hive’s customers is a leading manufacturer of industrial tools, household hardware, and other innovative solutions. The company’s products continue to play a significant role in shaping the lives and homes of people around the world today. The company’s future lies in creating new, innovative products – and for the product development team, the ability to streamline internal processes is crucial for success.
As a large, well-established organization, the company’s goal is to modernize its way of working with a new and improved approach to product management. Hive plays a vital role in the day-to-day work, planning and management of the company’s product development activities.
Making full use of Hive’s capabilities and exploring the new Hive Automate function has significantly improved the speed and innovation for our customer. So how is the company using Hive to work smarter and bring new, innovative products to market? Let’s dig in.
The Foundation: Using Hive To Manage Product Development From Start To Finish
Our customer uses Hive to manage the product development process from start to finish. The company has used Hive to launch several innovative products, including power tools created with recycled materials. The product development team is able to use Hive’s flexible projects and action card hierarchy to carry out the whole product development process for a wide range of new and innovative products.
The Program Management Officer (PMO)’s role is to keep track of projects and teams, and monitor continuous improvement projects for the business unit. Prior to using Hive, manual admin and organizational tasks were a huge time drain for managers like the PMO and his team members. Now with Hive, project templates can be set up to fulfill different requirements, which helps streamline the product development process for internal teams and external partners. The product development team can set up new projects in just a few clicks, minimizing time spent on manual planning.
Templatizing processes in Hive gives the PMO and his team time to focus on their real goal – bringing new and exciting products to market as quickly as possible.
We’ve been able to cut our product development process – the time from idea to market – in half roughly. – Program Management Officer at leading manufacturer
The team also has a monthly meeting where they sit down and compare goals to the reality of each project at that moment. It’s similar to a sprint planning meeting, where they decide to add another step, take something out, or make necessary adjustments. Hive is crucial for these meetings, as it gives everyone a snapshot overview of all projects and allows them to easily adjust project plans as necessary.
The Launch Of Hive Automate
The product development team has already significantly improved its efficiency thanks to Hive’s suite of project management functionalities. But with the recent launch of Hive Automate, the team can boost efficiency and streamline work even more. Let’s dig into how Hive Automate works and how the team uses it to streamline current workflows.
Hive Automate is a new feature that enables users to create workflows and share information between Hive and their other work apps. With Hive Automate, users can set up a sequence of steps (known as recipes) that will take place automatically, one after another, following a specified trigger event. Hive Automate can handle a wide range of workflow automation scenarios, including complex data transformations, conditional triggers and actions, duplicate detection, and much more.
When the industrial toolmaker first started using Hive, the Hive Automate function was still in development. As the team lead, the PMO accessed an early Beta version and started exploring how Hive Automate could streamline different tasks for the product development team. During this time, our customer and the team at Hive worked together, discussing how Hive Automate could be used. This is a great example of Hive’s community-built mission.
I will say hands down, Hive has been my favorite vendor to work with in my entire career. – Program Management Officer at leading manufacturer
How The Product Development Team is Using Hive Automate
When they first started using Hive Automate, the PMO began with simple triggers and events. One example was sending an email whenever there is a project update.
The team is currently using Hive Automate to monitor quality management. Hive Automate is programmed to monitor each quality milestone and switch from one milestone to the next. As this happens, Hive Automate updates project statuses, locks specified fields and sends leaders email updates.
I’d say I used to spend a good 30 hours a week keeping track of projects, but since we’ve adopted Hive, that is now probably 10 hours a week. Now my role is more monitoring and jumping into problem areas instead of bookkeeping. – Program Management Officer at leading manufacturer
The company is also currently working on the ability to share financial info from spreadsheets to Hive, which will finally bring all project information into one single place.
The ultimate goal? To use Hive as an automatic gatekeeper to help decide which projects are viable and worth further development, based on cost, resources, and other parameters.
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