Storyboard Presentation February 20-21, 2007 / St. Pete’s Beach, FL Telelogic & Valleylab Michael Lester Joe Sartor Product Portfolio Management at Valleylab: Adopting Best Practices

Storyboard Presentation February 20-21, 2007 / St. Pete’s Beach, FL Valleylab Telelogic Company Description:  Founded in 1967 as a medical products distributor, Valleylab soon expanded into product development by designing, manufacturing, and marketing advanced electrosurgery systems and accessories worldwide. Our ongoing research and product development continues to provide solutions for challenging surgical problems. We are unsurpassed in creating products to increase safety in the OR for both the patient and surgical staff.  New products (less than 3 years old) currently account for 30% of revenues, but the goal is 50%.  We pride ourselves on customer satisfaction and understanding the customer’s requirements and delivering exactly what they request. Brief Description of Enabling Tool:  We use Telelogic Focal Point as the tool which gives us visibility into the product pipeline, complete with metrics, resource availability, and integration with Microsoft Project for planned and actual dates.  Strength is in keeping requirements as the “focal point” in the decision making process. We pride ourselves on delivering products that the OR values so we need to keep the requirements of the target audiences visible throughout our Gate meetings and in What-If analysis. Image from Focal Point

Storyboard Presentation February 20-21, 2007 / St. Pete’s Beach, FL Valleylab Telelogic Illustration of Your Stage-Gate Process: Detailed Description of Enabling Tool:  With Focal Point, we capture all information about target markets and their needs and use that to drive the development of preliminary product plans. Once plans are evaluated against the other possibilities, and those already in the pipeline, we assess the availability of requirements.  Once we have a picture of achievability, we focus on making it a reality – keeping priorities in front of us. Integration with Microsoft Project allows the details of the project to managed effectively, and milestones and other data critical to the decision-making at the gate meetings.  The use of Focal Point is throughout all stages and gates – it has become our central “source of the truth” for everything from ideas to launched products

Storyboard Presentation February 20-21, 2007 / St. Pete’s Beach, FL Valleylab Telelogic Lessons Learned:  We took nearly 2 years to select a tool and really knew from the outset that we wanted to keep requirements as the focus – the connecting point – throughout the entire process… so we would have looked only for vendors that could meet that – rather than casting a wide net.  Focusing on the decision-making process first, over automating the resource management and/or project management was by far, the best decision we made. Automating those processes without knowing that we were selecting the right projects, or taking too long to make the right decisions wouldn’t have given us the savings we see today. Team:  The team consisted of Valleylab staff (which have changed since the beginning of the implementation), Telelogic consultants with specialization in product portfolio management, and a 3 rd Party consulting group.  Focal Point has been deployed to project managers, resource managers, project teams and the executive team. Results:  We are still only 9 months into our implementation so we can’t compare previous year performance, but our decision-making process has been cut considerably. What used to take 2-3 weeks can be done in one meeting. That savings is enormously valuable.  We have recognized an increase in awareness by the decision-making teams on the impact of frequent changes on the productivity of the teams.