Case Study: New Balance races ahead with high-performing project and portfolio management

Company: New Balance
Industry: Shoes and Apparel
Size: 5,000 employees

The customer: powering performance

New Balance Athletics Inc (New Balance) has been making products to help athletes perform at their best for more than 100 years. It prides itself on being the only major company to produce more than four million pairs of athletic shoes in the USA every year.

The challenge: a growing project portfolio

Whether powering professional athletes or helping ordinary people to lead a healthier lifestyle, New Balance must continually innovate and develop its products to stay at the top of its game. Fast and efficient delivery to market is essential to helping the company maintain its competitive edge and reputation for innovation and quality.

In line with the company’s growth across the states and internationally, its project portfolio was continually expanding. Major IT and new product development projects were being managed and reported on using spreadsheets linked to presentation slides. This gave limited visibility across the portfolio and made it difficult to understand and manage project priorities. The highly-manual processes also stalled efforts to provide timely management information on individual projects and across the portfolio.

Faced with an increasing number of project requests and with limited IT resources, New Balance needed a streamlined and centralized project and portfolio management solution that could be used across all geographies.

The solution: streamlined and integrated PPM

New Balance partnered with Rego Consulting to deploy Clarity.

Rego helped to ensure a successful implementation and rapid adoption with proof-of-concept prototyping and weekly management meetings, as well as by assisting with user acceptance testing across the organization. Monthly meetings with the steering committee also meant that senior sponsors were informed and supportive throughout.

In addition, Rego created a customized report and portlet to provide real-time insight into specific details and KPIs for the company’s project teams and senior managers.

Clarity PPM is now used by more than 230 staff across New Balance’s IT department and new product development teams. Approximately 40 projects across all regions are currently managed using the solution, which includes time tracking and resource management.

The benefits: better prioritization

With Clarity, New Balance has real-time visibility into the status, risks and issues across its project portfolio as well as into the time and resources involved in its IT initiatives or the development of new products. In addition, centralized information and more streamlined and automated processes will enable project teams to bring new initiatives and products to market faster.

New Balance now has the insight to inform decision-making and effectively prioritize resources and projects, which will help the company to uphold its reputation for quality and innovation and maintain its competitive edge.

Rego’s product expertise and experience ensured a smooth and rapid CA PPM deployment that met our business needs and objectives, and that will play a key role senior management decision-making.

New Balance