Godrej Interio-NPI

Godrej Interio, a business unit of Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd., is India’s largest furniture company. It is one of India’s premium furniture brands and serves both home and institutional segments. Products range from chairs, sofas, wardrobes to office cubicles & healthcare products like ICU beds. Currently the company is present in all major cities in India with 52 company owned stores and over 800 dealers.

In order to stay ahead in the market, Godrej Interio’s NPI (New Product Initiatives) division continuously designs and manufactures new and innovative products that emphasize comfort and aesthetics while delivering environment friendly, durable and functional furniture solutions. Some of these are lower complexity projects with lower lead times and others are high complexity projects which take a longer time to complete. In either case, while this entire new product development happens in-house, manufacturing of the newly developed products requires support by in-house manufacturing plants as well as more than 300 vendors (domestic & international). Therefore, as in most NPD organizations, there was interruptions, frequent rework and significant delays in development and launch of products (delay to the extent of more than one year from the planned launch date in few cases). Consequently, the company was experiencing year on year drop in output and low contribution of new products to sales.

To overcome these problems, the company implemented a rapid R&D solution based on Theory of constraints. The target was to increase output of new products from the R&D pipeline while reducing development lead time & variability. This was important to achieve since the company’s B2C business is heavily reliant on seasonal demand of festivals. So faster launches to meet market needs are as important as launching near the season with minimum variation. The table below summarises some of the results achieved after two years of implementation (in 2019-20 & 2020-21):