Beyond Project Management: A Chemical's Org Story

For a global chemical company headquartered in the Netherlands, successive five-year periods of portfolio transformation and internationalization involving acquisitions, divestments and partnerships have propelled the company to an industry-leading position.

With annual net sales of approximately €10 billion and approximately 23,000 employees worldwide, the company is an innovator in health, nutrition and materials. Personal care products, aromas and fragrances, medical devices and industrial coatings are among the company’s diverse business groups.

When the company first reached out to Sopheon in 2018, it had been using a home-grown legacy project management system that had reached the end of its useful life. The company needed a new solution with scalability and time was of the essence; company leadership required a rapid rollout, and few solutions were capable of scaling up so quickly.
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The Needs

  • A transition from a home-grown project management tool
  • A solution that could link business units and business groups by project and function
  • A rapid deployment timeline (three months)
  • A solution that could handle a massive data transfer from the legacy system to Accolade®

The challenges

  • Disconnected data and project management systems
  • Disparate portfolio reporting with poor company-wide visibility
  • Inconsistent dashboard visibility<
  • A homegrown MS Office integration
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How Sopheon helped

Using Accolade in an enterprise-scale, cloud-based deployment, the company is improving alignment between strategic initiatives, new product and platform development, portfolio analysis and day-to-day operational execution. The company now has a single and scalable source of innovation insight and streamlined, transparent data to manage its portfolios across its entire global footprint, initially with up to 2,500 worldwide users.

One of the key elements for success was the company’s confidence in Sopheon to provide consultancy to them to ensure that they met their very tight deadlines. Sopheon’s knowledge of the chemical industry and how Accolade can combine with our expertise was a critical piece of the implementation.

The company now gains rapid insight into the status of projects and portfolios, improving innovation execution throughout the company’s global footprint, which includes users in the Netherlands, Switzerland, North and South America, India, China and Japan. The company connects its data enterprise, enforces corporate best practices and tailors Accolade for changing strategies, economics and competitive landscapes.

Working together with the company, Sopheon helped design and implement:

  • Better data conformity and accessibility
  • Better business unit and group portfolio data-sharing and analysis
  • Better innovation, product and portfolio management visibility
  • Simplified management of a complex global organization

What our experts say

“It was very important that this customer could migrate to a new platform on which they could grow and develop their innovation – with the minimum of disruption to the day to day business. We met that goal.”
Nigel Cordery

Director of Business Development, Sopheon

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