Community Forum – Benchmarking Industry Best Practices

Resource Type
Survey (Community Forum)
Publish Date
03/27/2017
Author
Innovation Research Interchange
Topic
Innovation Metrics
Associated Event
Publication

Sonoco is currently in the process of updating dashboard metrics to track progress against innovation goals for the company.  We would like to get feedback on what priority metrics your company tracks to benchmark industry best practices.

We received responses from 17 IRI member organizations. If you are interested in seeing the data cuts per industry and/or revenue, please contact Erika Toman at toman@iriweb.org.

Question 1 Other:  

  • Vitality Index (sales new products/total sales)
  • Bibliometrics, staff awards, IP

2. Do you track new product sales?  If yes, please note below what constitutes a new product and how many months you count the sales. 

  • New product would consist of incremental or transformational innovation within the first 12 months of launch. 
  • Products are considered new for 5 years.
  • We include products that follow our stage-gate development process.  We track sales for 60 months after launch.
  • New SKU in last 5 years
  • Any new product whether it is incremental or truly new.  Some technologies are offered on an annual release basis – continuous improvement.  Track first year of sales as one metric and aggregate 5 year sales as a second metric.
  • New product is new and not a minor change.  A new product needs 3 commercial sales and a reasonable sales margin (specific is confidential).  We track for 5 years once a product is commercialized.
  • New product is either something totally new to the product offering or a generational update to existing product. Those new sales are closely tracked for 2 years.
  • Yes.  A new product is a completely new or modification of an existing product that is beyond a simple SKU change (e.g. different packaging).
  • 60 months for new sales.  Must be a change in product performance and or composition.
  • Released over the last four years. We count sales for 48 months.

3.  Do you track any other priority metrics, including metrics regarding cultural or behavioral elements?  If yes, please list them below. 

  • Patent Index = % sales from patented products
  • Budget spending
  • Number of scale-ups, number of commercialized products, time to develop, time to scale-up to commercialize, and total time.
  • For the largest projects, we track/dashboard staffing effectiveness levels.
  • Shift to targeted growth areas as set by strategy planning; customer driven projects versus market platform vs. technology based.
  • Metrics such as safety and security events, and non-compliances are tracked.  Staff engagement and productivity surveys are also conducted and tracked.
  • Collaboration, Accountability and Customer Centricity