Case Study – Week 12 / Management Information Systems
Sloan Valve Company—IT and the Redesign of the New Product
Development Process
The Sloan Valve Company, founded in 1906
and head quartered in Franklin Park, Illinois, is a
family-owned manufacturer of faucets,
flushometers, showerheads, and sinks with
growing domestic and international operations.
The company has always taken pride in its ability
to develop and introduce new products and
innovations as a leader in its industry. Indeed, its
mission explicitly notes “the ability to develop,
manufacture, market and distribute
breakthrough products and services” as a major
goal of the organization. As a result of an
increasing awareness that its approach to the
development of new products was no longer
delivering on that goal, management sought to
introduce changes into the process. A new ERP
package, while arguably wellimplemented, did
little to help. A project to incrementally improve
the logistic process was also abandoned after
months of work resulted in little to show for it.
After the less-than-successful attempt to
drive incremental improvements into the logistic
process—a result of the complex
interdependency of this process with many
others in the company—management at Sloan
Valve started looking for an alternative
approach. Part of the problem was the need to
change the way IT was perceived inside the
company. Traditionally, employees viewed IT at
Sloan Valve as a support function for individual
departments, which resulted in well-defined
boundaries between IT and those other
functions. IT-enabled business processes, on the
other hand, tend to cut across those same
functions, so a new approach was needed.
Recognizing these issues, senior management
appointed the existing chief information officer
(CIO) to the additional role of chief process
officer (CPO). In fact, senior management went
so far as to announce, in 2004, than these were
not two different responsibilities held by the
same person, but rather a single role. “It was a
O’Brien and Marakas, Introduction to Information Systems, Sixteenth Edition, New York: Mc Graw Hill, 2013 - Chapter 11
clear signal from top management. The CIO is
typically seen as a person in charge of
technology. By combining the CIO and CPO roles,
management sent a clear message that the CIO
would from now on lead as a business executive
and take on the role of a business leader as well,”
says a manager at Sloan Valve.
Given its critical importance to the company,
the New Product Development process was the
first one targeted through a series of initiatives
undertaken by Tom Coleman, now CIO/CPO. The
first step was to procure exposure and training
on business process reengineering for the entire
senior management team. Eventually, all senior
and middle managers, business analysts, and
program managers underwent formal training.
Senior management worked with reluctant
executives to win them over to the new
approach and gain their full commitment to the
project. A few who had strongly opposed the
plan left the company, and others were assigned
to new functions. In order to obtain commitment
and support from all involved, the CIO/CPO
created a two-level governance structure. The
strategic level would be composed of key
members from each functional department, led
by the CEO, and would enable cross-function
coordination and communication. The process
level would oversee efforts in particular
processes. Tom Coleman took the role of
architect and visionary, raising awareness of the
new process orientation across the organization,
and a strong IT manager with extensive business
knowledge was made responsible for the day-to-
day progress of the project.
For the New Product Development process,
the Director of Design Engineering became the
process owner. The BPM manager appointed by
the CIO/CPO led the redesign team, which
included members from manufacturing, design,
engineering, IT, finance, marketing, and
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Case Study – Week 12 / Management Information Systems
operations—in short, from all areas of the
company, as the process is integral to the
organization and cuts across every single
function. The team spent nine months studying
the current process, identifying subprocesses,
associated activities, and interfaces with other
processes, as well as any other
interdependencies that needed to be
considered. Visualization tools from iGrafx aided
analysis of a such a complex undertaking, which
allowed the team to create a visual
representation of the process and how
information flowed from one to another of the
sixteen functions included in it. This process map
also served as a communication tool and to
educate the company as to the many problems
and deficiencies that existed in the current
process. Indeed, for most people it was the first
time they saw the entire process in action. “This
technique typically shocks senior management
in terms of how the company actually runs,” says
Coleman. The graphical representation was also
effective in a different way. When making a
presentation about what the new process would
look like, the manager in charge of the effort
would bring down the ‘as-is’ diagram with all the
steps across the sixteen functions from the wall
and tear it up in front of everybody in the room—
that typically had the effect of conveying to
everybody how serious the company was about
changing the way it worked.
A series of metrics were identified to help
measure the extent to which the new project
would be deemed successful. Chief among these
were the metrics that reflected the main
objectives the company wanted to achieve with
the process redesign: namely, time-to-market,
innovation rate, and total new products. These
metrics were incorporated into strategy maps
and balanced scorecards that further helped
align the new process with the strategy of the
organization. The CIO/CPO also decided to
upgrade the ERP package into the MySAP
business suite, which added customer
relationship management, supply chain
management, and product lifecycle
management capabilities. The basic components
O’Brien and Marakas, Introduction to Information Systems, Sixteenth Edition, New York: Mc Graw Hill, 2013 - Chapter 11
of the latter were put in place in 2006, with all
the upgrades being completed by 2007.
However, upgrading the ERP package at the
same time the New Product Development
process was being redesigned and continually
improved was a major challenge for the
company, as the software modules needed to be
customized repeatedly for each new iteration of
the process. The major issues, however, were
not technical, but rather organizational. Says
Coleman, “The major issues we faced with NPD
[New Product Development] and other process
efforts were leadership, change management,
and slow organizational changes needed to
make process work ‘sing.’ The technology issues
are challenging but not nearly as difficult as the
human side of change.”
The new process introduced at Sloan Valve
consisted of six subprocesses, each grouping a
logical set of activities. Employees from each of
the individual functions that interacted with the
old process were transferred to one of the
subprocesses, with commensurate changes in
their objectives and reward structures. A new
program management office was created to
coordinate the new product initiatives as they
moved along the process, and to make sure the
necessary resources—human or technological—
were made available at the appropriate times, as
well as overseeing project prioritization. In 2008,
management created a new role for a senior vice
president of New Product Development to lead
the new process and take executive ownership
of it.
Given the earlier issues with the original
implementation of the ERP, the CIO/CPO wanted
to develop strong IT capabilities to support the
newly designed process effectively. These took
the form of an “Ideation Portal,” an intranet
platform that was deployed to provide structure
to the management of new product ideas, which
was done in a very ad hoc manner before, and
effective use of the Product Lifecycle Module
that was implemented when the company
migrated to MySAP. The module allowed the
process owner to get a complete picture of every
project at every stage of the process, and track
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Case Study – Week 12 / Management Information Systems

and allocate resources as necessary to different
ideas, as well as see which were lagging behind
schedule. The software also solved the
communication and coordination challenges
faced by the company with the implementation
of a centralized repository of all documents,
reports, design templates, and other project
files, which were available from any location due
to the Web-enabled nature of the product.
The implementation of the new process has
resulted in a number of benefits for the Sloan
Valve Company. Most notably, the time-to-
market of new ideas went from 18–24 months to
less than 12 months, which significantly
improves the agility and responsiveness of the
company to bring new products to market and
swiftly react to new demands or preferences
from its customers. The governance structure of
the process is much simplified, from 16 different
units having to collaborate and coordinate
among themselves to a two-tier governance
structure led by top-level executives. The ability
to see the entire process from end-to-end
enabled managers to identify bottlenecks and
quickly move to improve the flow of new ideas
and products, an aspect that is enhanced by the
increased accountability integrated into the new
process. Increased emphasis in the idea-
generation stage—further supported by
technologies such as the Ideation Portal—
allowed the company to sift through the many
new ideas earlier than before, resulting in less
design and prototyping work conducted for
ideas that were eventually discarded, with
significant savings. As a result, those ideas that
did proceed to the later stages and eventually
made it to market yielded a better return on
investment, as only the solid ideas made it that
far. This is, at the end of the day, what new
product development is all about.
SOURCE: Balaji, S., Ranganathan, C. and Coleman, T. “IT-Led
Process Reengineering: How Sloan Valve Redesigned Its
New Product Development Process,” MIS Quarterly
Executive, 2011; Martin, M., “Celebrating 100 Years . . .
Sloan Valve Continues to Build on Strong Foundation,” The
Wholesaler, May 2011; and www.sloanvalve.com , accessed
June 10, 2011.

QUESTIONS
Discuss in a group about these questions below:

1. The endeavor chronicled here would arguably be considered a success. What were the key success
factors— changes, practices, techniques, and so on—that made this possible? How did each
contribute to the positive outcomes of the project?
2. The company adopted a two-level governance structure with a strategic and a process level. How
would this approach work? What kind of issues should be discussed in each level? What are the
advantages of taking such an approach?

O’Brien and Marakas, Introduction to Information Systems, Sixteenth Edition, New York: Mc Graw Hill, 2013 - Chapter 11 3