Diary of Accenture
and Nicola Rathbone from Handsban

In this article, WMB and Accenture monitor the progress of Nicola Rathbone of Handsban. Nicola won the Accenture WMBig Idea Award at the O2 WMB Conference & Awards 2007. Through these diary notes, we hope to bring our readers through the various stages of development of Nicola’s product. But for the moment, here is what Nicola has to say:

When I started working on this project, as an outsider to the industry I was trying to enter into, I had nothing but guess and conjecture to start from. While hard work and research goes a long way to filling in the gaps, winning the WMBig Idea Award provided a fast track to highly experienced people who worked within the industry and who could clarify whether I was heading in the right direction or not.

Richard Witt was very encouraging, helping me highlight the key sales advantages to my customer: pharmaceutical companies who bottle pills and vitamins. These advantages are significantly different to the advantages to the end user. For the end user, the high level of child-safety combined with the ease of use are important features. For the companies buying the bottle as packaging, price advantage is first and foremost. Working through the production process Mr. Witt and I identified several points of cost benefit over and above the purchase price.

My second meeting, with Peter Smith, a supply chain expert, considered one of the top in his field, was even more beneficial. My intention with this container is to turn it into the ‘Intel Inside’ of Child-resistant Containers. To do this I need either to licence the patent to numerous bottle manufacturers or to become the key CRC supplier to the pharmaceutical industry. Obviously licencing is the easiest and more realistic route but once again, the reasons for a bottle manufacturer to take the licence are different to the reasons a pharmacuetical company would choose to purchase the bottle. I hoped it would be a ‘pull’ situation where interested pharmaceutical companies would encourage their suppliers to take a licence.

Mr. Smith stopped that thought dead. Liability considerations would prevent any company from doing that. The driver for the bottle manufacturers to take a licence is the opportunity to increase their share in the market place, and increase their profit line. Any pitch for licencing would have to focus on that.

Gavin Maxwell took over as my mentor. As his expertise is in developing business plans for pitching to investors, his appointment was ideal. He is currently assisting in perfecting the business plan. We also identified a number of key personnel in Accenture who could help move the product closer to the shelf.

Read more of the Accenture Diary in the April | May 2008 issue of WMB, on newsstands now.