Developing A Stage-Gate Standard Operating Procedure for Digital R&D Requisition and Life Cycle Management in a Philippine Manufacturing Firm

Abstract

This study addressed the operational vulnerabilities in the manual and informal New Product Development (NPD) framework at S-Line International by designing a cloud- native digital workflow architecture. A qualitative-descriptive research design, a diagnostic evaluation was conducted with core stakeholders (n=8), including the R&D Head, R&D staff, and Sales Managers. The review confirmed that reliance on shared folders, and manual spreadsheet logs caused severe data integrity risks, version control chaos, ad-hoc prioritization and sample release delays. To resolve these gaps, a Stage-Gate Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) was engineered within the Microsoft Power Platform. The solution automated intake, pre-screening, RACI-based role accountability, and cross-functional alerts for Finance and Production. The findings demonstrated that digitizing quality gates and enforcing an immutable audit trail eliminated tribal knowledge dependencies, protected technical bandwidth, and transformed the R&D function into an adaptive, data-driven innovation engine.