Nobody in manufacturing needs to be sold on stage gates. The model is decades old, it's taught, it works, and most organizations of any size have a version of it written down. That makes the failure mode interesting, because the methodology usually isn't the problem, the infrastructure underneath it is.

The Two Common Options

Organizations generally choose between two kinds of stage-gate tooling, and both tend to fail in predictable ways.

1. Enterprise PPM platforms: They enforce gate governance properly, but they also take months to stand up, need a consultant to configure and often another to change, and arrive with a data model that has to be reconciled against everything else the business runs. By the time the implementation lands, the gate model it encodes is the one the business had at kickoff.

2. Spreadsheets: They deploy instantly and enforce nothing. A gate is a tab, a criterion is a cell somebody filled in, and approval is an email. The process exists on paper and in the discipline of the people running it, which works until the people change.

Large enterprise implementations carry real risk on their own. Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 70% of recently implemented ERP initiatives will fail to fully meet their original business goals, and a portfolio management platform implemented the same way inherits much of that exposure.

So many organizations end up with spreadsheets while intending the enterprise platform. A disciplined process runs on undisciplined infrastructure, and the gate review meeting becomes a document-gathering exercise where half the time goes to establishing what's actually true before anyone can decide anything.

What a Gate Review Should Be

A gate review is a decision: proceed, hold, kill, or proceed with conditions. That decision needs three things, current status against the criteria, the evidence behind it, and the people authorized to make the call.

When those are assembled manually before each meeting, two failures tend to follow. The review happens late, because assembly takes time, and the decision gets made against a picture that's already out of date, which is why so many gates are approved conditionally and then quietly revisited.

When gate status is live, the review starts at the decision. That one change is often worth more than any additional reporting rigor.

Gate Models Are Configuration

A more useful way to think about it is that a gate model is configuration, not code. Gates, criteria, evidence requirements, and approvers are structure, and structure should be something the business can define and change itself.

Built on the platform the business already runs on, with the permissions model already in place, a gate model can be set up in days and adjusted in an afternoon. That matters because gate models change. A new product category needs a different qualification stage, a regulatory shift adds an evidence requirement, and an acquisition brings a plant with a different practice. In a months-long implementation, each of those is a change request, while in a configurable system, each happens much more quickly.

Where Cloud Coach Fits

In Cloud Coach, the gate model is something an admin builds rather than something a consultant implements. Because it runs natively in Salesforce, gates, criteria, evidence, and approvers sit in the same org and permissions model the business already maintains, so a new qualification stage or evidence requirement is a configuration change the team can make itself. Cloud Coach is typically live in days rather than months, which means the first gate review can run on live status while the problem that justified it is still current.

Adoption Is the Real Test

There's a quieter argument for speed that has nothing to do with cost. Governance only works if people use it, and people tend to use systems that arrive while the problem is still live.

The broader record on technology change bears that out. BCG research found that about 70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives, and only around 30% achieve them. A process nobody had to wait six months for tends to be one that gets adopted. A process that arrives long after the crisis that justified it often gets treated as overhead, worked around, and eventually abandoned in favor of the spreadsheet it was supposed to replace.

How We See It

The methodology was never the bottleneck, the implementation was. If the gate model is sound and gate reviews still feel like archaeology, the answer isn't more process, it's putting the process somewhere it can stay current.

Frequently Asked Questions Related to Manufacturing

• What is stage-gate software for manufacturers?

It's a system that holds a stage-gate model, including the gates, criteria, evidence requirements, and approvers, and tracks each program's live status against it, so gate reviews run on current information rather than a pre-meeting compilation.

• Do manufacturers need an enterprise PPM platform to run stage gates?

Not necessarily. Stage-gate governance mainly needs defined gates, live status, evidence, and named approvers. A configurable platform the business already uses can provide that without a months-long implementation.

• What should happen in a stage-gate review?

A decision: proceed, hold, kill, or proceed with conditions. That needs current status against the gate criteria, the evidence behind it, and the people authorized to make the call, ideally all available before the meeting starts.

• How often should a stage-gate model change?

Whenever the business does. New product categories, regulatory changes, and acquisitions often call for new stages or evidence requirements, which is why it helps when the gate model can be adjusted by an internal admin instead of through a change request.

Sources Cited

Gartner, "What IT Leaders Must Do to Avoid Disappointing ERP Initiatives" (Denis Torii, 2024). https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/insights/what-it-leaders-must-do-to-avoid-disappointing-erp-initiatives

Boston Consulting Group, "Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success," October 2020. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/increasing-odds-of-success-in-digital-transformation