CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
October 1, 2007
Implementation Investments
Scott Bader Sharpens Innovation Focus with Sopheon's Accolade® System
Sopheon, the international software and services company, announced today that Scott Bader, a U.K.-based producer of composite and specialty polymer resins, has selected Sopheon's Accolade product life cycle management (PLM) solution to enhance the company's product innovation and portfolio management processes. Scott Bader will deploy the Sopheon system among users in research and development, marketing and executive roles at company locations in the U.K., France, North America, Croatia, South Africa and Dubai.
Founded in 1920, Scott Bader has a rich history as a product innovator. The company created the first polyester resin that would cure at room temperature, the first air-drying polyesters, and the first polyester resins for marine applications. The latter were used to make the hull for the world's first large glass-reinforced plastic boat. Scott Bader is a past winner of the Queens Award, the highest honor a U.K. company can receive for technological innovation.
Against this backdrop of achievement, Scott Bader recently launched an organization-wide strategic initiative aimed at renewing the company's commitment to innovation. A principal goal of the effort is to increase market share by accelerating product development and bringing more successful products to market. Underlying strategies include shifting the focus of research and development away from custom resin solutions toward new-to-the-world products with broad market appeal. Sopheon's Accolade system will play a central part in the initiative by enabling Scott Bader to automate its product development process and make more informed decisions about which product ideas to develop.
In addition to providing process automating capabilities, the Accolade modules being deployed by Scott Bader will furnish advanced support for product portfolio, resource and idea management. Expected advantages include more effective prioritization of product development projects, improved visibility of project details, stronger collaboration within project teams and across functional silos, and more consistent focus of resources on commercially promising product opportunities. The idea management module will facilitate the submission and capture of product ideas and supply scorecards that will help users systematically and objectively evaluate them. Scott Bader is also implementing an Accolade Accelerator application that will reduce the amount of time required to put the company's new innovation process in place.
"It's important to our business success that we continue to further the maturity of our innovation process," said Global Research and Development Director Roy Phillipps of Scott Bader. "One area where we want to grow in sophistication is process measurement. Accolade will help us capture the metrics needed to track and evaluate the efficiency and predictability of our process and the business value of the projects that pass through it. The best-practice content provided by the Sopheon system is also important to us because it will enhance our reporting capabilities and support the kind of 'what-if' analysis required to make the right go/kill business decisions on projects coming into our developmental pipeline. Chemistry is our business. But innovation is our path to creating value for our customers. We view Accolade as a critical component of our value-creation strategy."
"Today's chemical industry is $2.2 trillion in size and growing," said Bryan Seyfarth, solutions marketing director for Sopheon. "For most chemical producers, however, product commoditization is a significant, continuing challenge. Scott Bader has long understood that the answer is product innovation. They have made it a focal point of their business goals and philosophy. The business decision-support and process efficiencies that Accolade can provide are directly aligned with their requirements. Scott Bader joins more than 50 top chemical and chemical-related companies around the world that are using Accolade today to address their needs for effective innovation process governance."
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