2016–2020
PepsiCo Process Gallery: pilot-plant time booked from one screen instead of a spreadsheet per site
Before a new snack or drink reaches a store, PepsiCo’s food scientists and engineers run trials on pilot-plant equipment in process centers from Plano to Leicester, Monterrey and Shanghai. Each center took requests on its own form. We designed and built the R&D Process Gallery inside MyPepsiCo, where researchers find equipment across every center, see when it is free and book a trial, and each center’s schedulers approve it. We kept improving it with them until 2020.
- 460+
- pilot-plant trials booked by 240+ R&D associates in the first three months (PepsiCo Snacks R&D, 2017)
- 12
- process centers in the gallery, eight live and four being added (March 2019)
- 5
- phases of improvements with researchers and schedulers, 2016–2020
Schematic — client UI under NDA
- Client
- PepsiCo
- Industry
- Food & Beverage
- Scope
- Application design and development · Scheduling and approval workflow · Information architecture · Training · Enhancements
- Platform
- IBM WebSphere Portal + Web Content Manager
- Partnership
- 2016–2020
Challenge
PepsiCo’s R&D food scientists and engineers develop new products on specialized pilot-plant equipment spread across process centers in the US, Mexico, the UK and China, and one development cycle often needs equipment and know-how from more than one of them.
In 2016 each process center had its own request form: an Excel file for Monterrey, another for Plano, Shanghai, Barrington or Beaumont Park, with part of the process in an old SharePoint site and schedulers reached through email lists. To plan a trial, a researcher had to work out what each machine could do and whether it was free, then send the right form to the right center and wait.
PepsiCo wanted every food scientist and engineer in Global R&D to have open, online access to request pilot-plant equipment at any center, and every center to schedule it the same way.
Approach
One catalog, one calendar, every center
We designed and built the Process Gallery as an application inside MyPepsiCo, PepsiCo’s global intranet. Researchers search the equipment of one center or all of them, read each center’s page and its experts, and see a 90-day calendar of bookings. A request carries the trial’s objectives, equipment, dates, ingredients and allergens, and the gallery warns of a conflict before it is sent. Dates convert to each person’s time zone.
A shared way for centers to schedule
Each center’s schedulers get the new request by email, then approve it, send it back or reject it from their own dashboard; the researcher follows its status. We trained authors and schedulers before the launch in early 2017, center by center.
Improved with the people who use it
Over five phases, 2016–2020, we added what researchers and schedulers asked for: half-day and non-consecutive bookings, duplicating a past request, searching their own old requests, faster loading by archiving past requests, and, in 2020, changing trial dates after submitting, a report view, an Excel export, and a read-only view of other researchers’ bookings, so people could see what was taken before they asked. Each phase brought more process centers into the gallery.
Impact
Since its launch in March 2017, PepsiCo’s R&D associates have found, booked and combined pilot-plant equipment in one place instead of a form per site. In its first three months, 240+ R&D associates booked 460+ trials through it, with about 30,000 page views for Snacks (PepsiCo’s Snacks R&D team, 2017). In March 2019 the gallery listed 12 process centers, eight of them live and four more being added, from Barrington, Plano and Valhalla in the US to Monterrey, Shanghai and Beaumont Park in the UK.
The gallery became a model inside PepsiCo: in 2018 its Web Solutions team asked to use the Process Gallery’s patterns as the guide for how applications should be structured on the new MyPepsiCo. We designed, built and extended it over five phases, 2016–2020.