Cadbury Schweppes to implement innovation program

09/03/05 Cadbury Schweppes has selected Sopheon's Accolade portfolio and process management system to enhance a company-wide integrated portfolio management initiative aimed at increasing growth from innovation. The Accolade deployment spans 45 countries and includes 2,400 users in product development, marketing and commercial strategy. It encompasses all five of Cadbury's operating regions, specifically Americas Beverages; Americas Confectionery; Europe, Middle East and Africa; European Beverages; and Asia Pacific.

The Sopheon Accolade product development system automates gate- or phase-based product development processes and provides strategic decision support that allows companies to improve innovation, cut product development spending waste and shorten time-to-market. Sopheon's Monitor software operates as a "reading robot" that automatically reviews, filters, analyzes and pushes relevant content to healthcare and engineering professionals to enable effective compliance with protocols, standards and regulations.

Sopheon's Accolade will be used both to support product portfolio management and to automate and manage Cadbury Schweppes' implementation of Stage-Gate, a widely-used product development process methodology. The software system will serve as a central repository for product information within business units and across the company. Accolade was chosen because of its ease-of-use, speed and ease of deployment, comprehensive portfolio decision-support capabilities and overall cost-effectiveness.

"Cadbury Schweppes' stature as a leading innovator reaches back over 200 years," said Christine Connelly, chief information officer at Cadbury Schweppes. "We are determined that this commitment to innovation will be as much a part of our future as it has been our past. To maintain our market-leading position, we have outlined an organic growth strategy that relies upon our ability to innovate well and achieve high levels of return on our innovation investments. Sopheon's Accolade will give us the process uniformity and performance consistency we need to enable the sharing of knowledge and expertise across a common process and system platform, ensuring faster time-to-market with winning products."