Sopheon today announced that California Olive Ranch Inc., the largest producer of extra virgin olive oil in the United States, has selected and deployed Sopheon’s Accolade® Express software to enhance the management of its new product development (NPD) processes.
Founded in 1998, California Olive Ranch has pioneered new ways of cultivating and harvesting olives in order to make extra virgin olive oil premium and affordable. The company has developed its own ranches and has helped family farmers throughout Northern California develop previously unusable farm acreage into olive orchards. Led by a CEO who transitioned from the high-tech world to the farming world, the company leverages time honored farming techniques while fully embracing modern technology.
The success of the company in recent years, together with expansion into new markets and food product sectors, has resulted in impressive growth. While a positive step, this has added complexity to once simple to manage product development processes. As the company scales to meet aggressive plans for further growth, California Olive Ranch elected to partner with Sopheon to implement and digitize newly-designed planning and operational execution processes designed to enhance its ability to execute on its growth strategy and further advance its leadership position in the market.
“Sopheon is helping us to scale but still keep things simple,” said Mary Bolton, Director of Technical Services. “Using the best-practice new product development processes and document templates built into the Accolade Express software, we are collecting the information we need for good, collaborative decision-making and are defining and operationalizing new and more efficient processes across the company. With a small amount of training, we have been able to configure these standard processes and templates to incorporate our language and make them ‘ours’ without making things complicated.”
Reflecting on the implementation, Ms. Bolton stated: “We love the ease of use and capabilities of the software. It’s giving us discipline, providing visibility into project status and progress through reporting and analytics dashboards, and enabling more efficient decision making across the lifecycle of our development projects. Looking to the future, we are becoming aware of how we could extend the use of Accolade to different types of projects beyond new product development.”
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