About

About C+P Consulting

C+P Consulting GmbH is a product lifecycle management (PLM) and innovation consultancy based in Europe. We work for consumer packaged goods (CPG) and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) manufacturers. Our PLM consulting services help food and beverage companies choose a PLM platform and implement it. We provide the same support to beauty and ingredients companies. We then stay until their teams use it in daily work. Our small senior team has worked on at least 19 PLM and related system implementations. It brings more than 30 years of research and development (R&D) and innovation leadership.

C+P Consulting PLM specialists working with consumer goods manufacturers

Who we are

We're a consultancy of senior PLM specialists. We help consumer-goods manufacturers get their product data and innovation processes working properly. Most of our work covers specification management and formulation management. It also includes regulatory and labelling work. We handle process re-engineering and data migration, which is the stage where a PLM programme falls behind schedule.

PLM consulting is our core practice. Alongside it, we advise on innovation transformation and on project and portfolio strategy. We also build business intelligence and reporting so R&D leaders can see what's moving through their pipeline. Our role is solely to provide consultancy, so the choice of platform always stays with the client.

The founders

Lucio Pieroni and Marco Caprino founded C+P. Between them, they cover the product-development business and the system that holds its product data, which every PLM programme has to bring together.

Lucio Pieroni

Lucio is Co-Founder and Innovation Principal. He spent decades leading innovation and R&D inside global manufacturers. That included senior roles at Procter & Gamble and at Mars, where he was Global Senior Vice President for Pet Food. For the past 15 years, he has advised large accounts on transformation. He specialises in organisational change management and end-to-end innovation processes, so he speaks for the people who'll work with a new system long after the consultants leave.

Marco Caprino

Marco is Co-Founder and Solution Architect. He came up through the technical side of the work, in PLM data models and enterprise architecture. He has close to two dozen implementations behind him, across PLM and related product systems. He's spent more than 10 years in PLM and digital transformation. He also has 15 years in information technology (IT) consulting. When a design decision affects the data model, Marco is the one who checks that it'll still hold up once the system goes live.

The senior team

Christopher Fresca is our Enterprise Solutions Architect and works directly alongside the founders. He has more than 15 years in IT, with experience in solution and enterprise architecture. His experience also covers systems integration and digital transformation. At C+P, he focuses on PLM for consumer-goods manufacturers. Integration is the point where a new PLM platform meets the systems a manufacturer already runs. If that link is weak, specification data stops at the edge of R&D and never reaches the rest of the business.

Meet the full team

Three offices, one delivery model

All three of our offices follow the same six-stage delivery method. A client gets the same stages and sign-offs, whichever office leads the work. Here is the order we work in:

  1. Assess. We put a number on the return on investment (ROI) and map current processes and data, along with where teams feel the pain.
  2. Design. A structured fit-gap analysis ends in a business blueprint the client signs off.
  3. Build. We configure the platform standard-first, in agile iterations. Real users test each iteration in early conference-room pilots.
  4. Migrate. Specifications and formulations move with the rest of the product data in a clean, structured migration. Analytics prove the data arrived intact.
  5. Adopt. Training and hypercare lead to a handover to a steady-state team that keeps improving the system after go-live.
  6. Optimise. Ongoing optimisation continues, with new integrations and analytics added as needs grow.

Design carries most of the risk. We settle complexity in the blueprint, because a gap that first shows up in user acceptance testing (UAT) costs far more time to fix than one caught on paper.

Senior people on site

The senior experts who scope an engagement are the same people who turn up on site and do the work, regularly and in person. You talk directly to them, and no account manager sits in the middle passing messages along. They spend their time solving problems instead of writing status reports. We set a clear framework of control at the start and stay flexible inside it.

This presence matters most when a programme is in trouble. For one food and beverage client, we recovered a stalled multi-site rollout that had got stuck in UAT because of unplanned customisations and process gaps. Before you sign with any firm, ask who'll be on site in the sixth week of the project. Then ask to meet them.

Sectors we serve

Sectors C+P Consulting serves across CPG and FMCG manufacturing

We serve manufacturers whose products are built from formulations and sold under regulated labels. That covers nine sectors:

  • Food
  • Beverage
  • Home care
  • Beauty care
  • Ingredients
  • Flavours and fragrances
  • Specialty chemicals
  • Paint, ink and coatings
  • Tobacco products

Clients named on our site include Ferrero and Lindt. Döhler and Henkel are also named. The core of PLM stays the same from sector to sector. What changes is the regulatory content and how much weight each sector puts on labelling compared with formulation control. So check that whoever you hire knows your sector's rules as well as the software.

Why we stay small

We stay small and senior so clients deal directly with the specialists who do the work. That way each engagement gets partner-level attention, with R&D and IT depth on the ground. A rotating bench of juniors can't offer the same. We take on a programme only when we can make a difference to it. We also keep scope and charges in the open and never run hidden activities on a client's account.

We've been through these programmes before. That experience lets us bring leading practices and adapt them to how each manufacturer works, without forcing a method onto them.

How to work with us

Most engagements start with Assess, because a measured ROI and a map of the current state give both sides a shared starting point. A small team can only run a limited number of programmes at the same time. So raise your timeline in the first conversation. If you're comparing PLM consulting services, ask for the people who'd deliver the work to join that first meeting. With us, they will. If you're a manufacturer planning a PLM programme or rescuing one that has stalled, talk to us about it.