Case Study: Honeywell

Honeywell, a $25 billion diversified technology and manufacturing leader, needed a better way to identify gaps and opportunities to maximize product and technology re-use, evaluate conditions that impact their business, and decide how to achieve their business goals as efficiently and effectively as possible. Partnering with Alignent, Honeywell adopted a disciplined roadmapping effort to complement to the company's planning process.

Today, Alignent's solutions are literally the first step of the company's sophisticated product and technology planning process. Alignent's roadmapping solutions have been adopted by Honeywell company-wide—across every business unit—including strategic planning, annual operating plan, new product introduction, Design for Six Sigma and management resource review.

"Alignent has helped us create a more collaborative strategic planning process. Our engineering and marketing teams now work in real-time to assess possibilities based on input from all stakeholders. This new linkage between the technologists and marketing groups has helped us better align plans with corporate objectives."

Bob Rasmussen
Director of Strategic Technology Planning
Honeywell

The Challenge

Honeywell has some of the top minds in engineering, research, marketing and other fields that drive the company's success. Not unlike many businesses of its size and complexity, Honeywell was looking for a better way to manage collaboration and coordination among various departments and business units. Achieving this would ultimately provide visibility into the entire organization while adding structure to the planning process, allowing Honeywell to reduce costs and redundancies, seize opportunities and manage the stages of successful innovation.

The organization's sophisticated planning processes involved gathering information about customers, market dynamics, competitors and long-term strategic direction. Collecting this critical data, and making the process inherently collaborative across each business function, was becoming a growing problem that threatened the success of the company's planning efforts.

In seeking a roadmapping partner, Honeywell identified its primary challenges:

  • Eliminate product development inefficiencies by stopping projects not precisely aligned to the customers' needs or the company's strategic objectives.
  • Break down "silos" and create an opportunity for various departments and business units to communicate, collaborate and innovate in a purposeful, coordinated way. Up to this point, each business unit had their own roadmaps, but there was no consistent way to communicate plans between business units.
  • Work across diverse business technology platforms. Like many global corporations, Honeywell had grown into a diverse enterprise, especially after its merger with AlliedSignal. This had created an environment where personnel in one business unit did not have the desired visibility into what was happening in other business units, making it difficult to re-use designs, components or technology platforms.
  • Develop a structure for planning that provides Honeywell visibility into the future including emerging markets, technologies and opportunities.

The Solution

Honeywell selected Alignent as its roadmapping software partner. Honeywell's implementation was designed specifically to help the company evaluate conditions that impact the business, understand planned investments and make decisions about business goals as efficiently and effectively as possible. Because Alignent is located at the "front-end" of the planning process, it ensures that Honeywell can leverage its various existing roadmaps and "connect the dots" on their path toward innovation.

Honeywell first developed a small task force began to define a roadmap process that included marketing, strategic planning and product development. After rolling out the architecture and process, the team introduced the system to the involved participants and began a staged rollout across most of its business units, including: Aerospace Electronic Systems, Aerospace Engines Systems and Services, Specialty Materials, and Automation and Control Systems.

The company also began deployments to new job functions and increased participation from product managers, engineers and strategic planners. The result was a fully cross-functional process that allowed engineers to create roadmaps, share technology plans and communicate with each other more effectively.

The Value

Within the first 18 months of deployment, the team observed major changes in two key business processes: strategic planning and technology development.

"With Vision Strategist, we created a more collaborative strategic planning process," said Bob Rasmussen, Director of Strategic Technology Planning, Honeywell. "This new linkage between the technologists and marketing groups has helped us better align plans with corporate objectives."

The product development process also saw improvements. Prior to Vision Strategist, all product development roadmaps were created by various individuals on their own initiative. They were created once and ultimately became static, since there was no single repository where they could be linked. With Vision Strategist, roadmapping teams work together to create more detailed roadmaps with participants from a variety of functions. The groups reconvene at regular intervals (timed with Honeywell's stage-gate process) where the roadmaps are reviewed and updated, ensuring a living, evolving roadmapping process.