Early Adopters Prove Accolade® Express for PPM Offering Enables Stage-Gate® Execution with Speed and Adoption Success
MINNEAPOLIS and LONDON—May 5, 2015—Sopheon, the international provider of software, expertise, and best practices for Enterprise Innovation Performance, announced the initial market launch of Accolade Express in early 2015 and is already showing significant business benefit.
Sopheon’s Accolade Express is a family of out-of-the box offerings that quickly and economically serve up world-class innovation management and new product development (NPD) capabilities for any enterprise looking for rapid adoption of best practices. A template-driven approach, coupled with predefined implementation scope and consulting services, results in significantly faster time-to-value, with deployment from project preparation and planning through to Go Live in as little as six weeks. The Accolade Express for PPM solution is designed for companies that are in a strong state of readiness to leverage software to improve their Stage-Gate® business process.
In 2014, Sopheon deployed an early adopter version of Accolade Express for PPM, and is pleased to report positive results. Vesuvius, an Accolade Express customer, reports exceeding their rollout timetable and achieving a high adoption of their Stage-Gate® process enabled by Accolade Express across multiple business units. After launching a new Stage-Gate® process in the spring of 2014, they purchased the Accolade solution in September and went live in December with a three-day executive and team kickoff workshop. The Vesuvius Stage-Gate® community spans four global sites and 300 cross-functional people, with several of the business units having 100% of their projects in the system.
George Coulston PhD, VP and CTO of Vesuvius, commented on the implementation:
“Vesuvius had introduced a Stage-Gate® process previously using an R&D centric effort with limited success. Last year, we took a more cross-functional approach, resulting in momentum that exceeded our project timeline goals. Accolade’s out-of-the-box best practices and cross-functional ease of use played an important role in speed of implementation and high adoption of our process.”
Don Sarno, Chief Operating Officer at Sopheon, monitored the rollout of Accolade Express for PPM closely and stated:
“Accolade Express is not for everyone, but when matched with a company that is in the proper state of readiness and with strong leadership support, time-to-value can be very fast. I must compliment Vesuvius on their accomplishment; they are the perfect profile for this solution.”
The Accolade Express for PPM solution is currently available for customer purchase and implementation.
Sopheon and Accolade are trademarks of Sopheon plc. Stage-Gate® is a registered trademark of Stage-Gate Inc.
About Sopheon
Sopheon partners with customers to provide complete Enterprise Innovation Performance solutions including software, expertise, and best practices to achieve exceptional long-term revenue growth and profitability. Sopheon’s Accolade solution provides unique, fully-integrated coverage for the entire innovation management and new product development lifecycle, including strategic innovation planning, roadmapping, idea and concept development, process and project management, portfolio management and resource planning. Sopheon’s solutions have been implemented by over 200 customers with over 60,000 users in over 50 countries. Sopheon is listed on the AIM Market of the London Stock Exchange and on the Alternext Exchange in the Netherlands.
