Industry Summary Articles

Sopheon today released the latest version of its Accolade®Enterprise Innovation Management (EIM) solution.

‘Good’ decisions are based on the availability of ‘good’ information − having meaningful, trusted and current data at your fingertips at the moment you need it. Business leaders driving decision-centric processes should be drawing on comprehensive information that is generated internally as well as gathered from outside the company. Sopheon has long focused on surfacing relevant and timely information to support better, faster decisions; with the release of Accolade version 11.2, Sopheon offers a new analytic and knowledge discovery capability to more proactively manage risk and create breakthrough innovations with greater efficiency. The new capability – named Accolade Insights – offers a range of benefits.

Further Connecting the Enterprise

Speed to informed decisions, critical in a fast-moving, digital business environment, depends on data that is timely, accurate, situationally aware and actionable. Accolade Insights automatically leverages and connects internal and external data sources to proactively consolidate and serve up intellectual ‘assets’ at the point a decision needs to be made. These assets include relevant experts and expertise, learnings from past work, and external macroeconomic changes impacting the critical assumptions underpinning business forecasts and key performance indicators.

Preempting Risk & Improving Accuracy of Business Forecasts

Accolade Insights was designed to help companies leverage internal data in combination with macroeconomic and other external factors for real-time monitoring of the health status of products, portfolios and projects, including the business case assumptions impacting accuracy of revenue and profit forecasts. This is equally applicable to the management of new product introductions, in-market products, product lines and market segments.

When shown a preview of this functionality, a $14 billion industrial manufacturing customer stated: “Some time ago we had what we thought was a great innovation, but the macroeconomics shifted in the middle of our product development cycle. In the end we went to market with a product that failed because we didn’t proactively adjust to the shift. Had I had this early visibility of the business case impact of the market dynamics, it would have saved us millions of dollars.”

Stimulating Innovation & Improving Efficiency through Proactive Knowledge Reuse

Many companies encounter redundancy of innovation effort. They waste time and money on duplicating work that has been done before; recreating experience that has been ‘lost’ when key employees have left; repeating the same mistakes project after project because lessons learned are not codified and shared; or not being aware of technology or other developments that could be reused to shorten the time required to develop breakthrough innovations. The pain associated with this becomes more pronounced with the increase in number of millennials in the workplace and their expectations for transparency and access, as well as the trend for companies to rotate knowledge workers across jobs and roles on a regular basis to stimulate employee engagement, which is regularly rated as a top concern for CEOs in this digital era.

The Accolade software automatically captures cross-functional work activity and work product, which become rich assets for reuse. Accolade Insights leverages patented search methodology to tap into this legacy knowledge, work product and experience to introduce project leaders and team members to past work and people in the organization who are either subject matter experts or who have navigated a similar work path before. This enables more efficient collaboration by serving up existing technologies, process, learnings and documents for reuse.

One long-standing Sopheon customer proudly relates how a breakthrough technology developed by a packaging business unit to retain freshness in potato chip bags was successfully reused for two entirely different applications by a separate division, generating millions in new revenue. The ‘discovery’ of the technology that was reused was enabled through Accolade.

To view the original press release, please click here.

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