Specialty chemical manufacturer speeds time-to-market with Accolade

A global, independent leader in polyurethanes, polycarbonates, coatings and adhesives had an immediate business need for more aggressive and better coordinated innovation activities. Company leadership viewed this as a priority for future growth in an increasingly globalized market.

The company turned to Sopheon for help in creating a streamlined, automated innovation process that gave all innovation leaders – across every business unit – the visibility, transparency and timely data needed to supercharge its innovative products and market strategies.

To achieve its goals, the company needed to digitalize its innovation process and integrate many different initiatives from its three business units into a platform which would provide a “single source of the truth”. With different tools and processes, each business unit could not maintain sufficient transparency and project prioritization for effective decision making at corporate level.
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The needs

  • Portfolio strategy and process alignment
  • Better visibility of innovation investments and performance metrics to the C-suite
  • An enterprise innovation management system that would scale efficiently across multiple business units around the globe.

The challenges

  • Inefficient cross-business unit communications
  • Lack of information sharing and strategy alignment due to multiple tools and processes
  • Missing visibility of R&D’s return of invest from new products
  • Lack of transparency to the innovation portfolio for the leadership team
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How Sopheon helped

Sopheon began working with the company in 2012 to launch Accolade® as a means to improve the company’s portfolio management and R&D project tools and processes. The company needed one distinct path from idea to market, and Accolade had an ease of configuration that was unrivaled among its competitors.

Sopheon’s Accolade enabled the company’s innovation process to be harmonized around the globe. While Accolade provides one global process, the system is flexible enough to still allow regional variances of working and data gathering. Sopheon co-founder and principal for the initial implementation, Huub Rutten said: “the goal is to have “one language” for the company but still allow “local dialects” to maintain dedication of employees everywhere in the world.”

Within less than nine months, the company placed hundreds of projects in Accolade. The company uses Accolade for process support and portfolio management capabilities around the globe. The ease with which innovation team members can configure and manage their processes, including integrations with MS Word® and MS Excel®, helps users adopt and integrate the system in day-to-day innovation work.

Sopheon helped design and implement:

  • Improved processes and collaborative abilities across three global business units on three continents
  • Enhanced portfolio management and visibility tools that ensure timely and complete access to information for C-suite decision makers
  • Better investment of resources and decision-making in the new product development process, due to better visibility to the portfolio and more accurate reporting

What our customers say

“Sopheon’s Accolade supports us focusing on the right projects, accelerates our time to market from concept to launch, and enables us to optimize product portfolio decision making for maximizing the returns on our innovation investments.”
Head of project

Head of Project, German Company listed in DAX

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BASF aligns strategy and innovation

Interested in more about chemicals organizations using Accolade to improve innovation practices and results? See how the world’s largest chemical company and long-time Sopheon customer BASF uses Accolade to track and manage roughly 3,000 research and development activities across the globe.

Download BASF CASE STUDY
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