Elly Yates-Roberts |
Operating within over 150 countries, global food and beverage company Mondelēz International needs to be able to monitor and accelerate its consumer-centric growth easily and effectively.
More than 40,000 employees work for Mondelēz and have been using several outdated, complex and time-consuming systems which held data across different platforms. The organisation wanted to base its project and portfolio decisions on real-time facts and insights, use real-time analytics to guide resource allocation and have a seamless system that reduced the amount of time employees spent on menial, data collection tasks.
To help boost its growth by optimising decision-making, Mondelēz needed to accelerate its response times to ensure it could keep up with changing market conditions whilst improving its product commercialisation, risk management and portfolio transparency. Consequently, the company worked with Microsoft partner Sopheon to replace its outdated system with a new single solution that manages its innovation portfolio, resources, demand planning and project execution from one central location.
Rather than automate the previous processes used by Mondelēz, Sopheon deployed its Accolade software, which is a flexible and scalable single innovation system, built on Microsoft technology and which leverages both Microsoft Project and Microsoft Office suite. Taking a two-phased approach, Sopheon first carried out a phase gate process that divides tasks into smaller stages and decision points to ensure global portfolio transparency. It then focused on execution and portfolio management, which included analysis of project times, optimisation, team boards, post-launch processes and forecasted versus actual revenues.
The initial Accolade implementation was carried out in nine weeks, and Sopheon then completed four weeks of testing and validation procedures.
“The beauty of this Accolade implementation is that we really are creating one single source of truth, not only for having all our products, but also for managing our portfolio resources in the same location,” says Andre Dias Alves da Silva, director of innovation to market for Mondelēz.
Accolade gives Mondelēz 100 per cent visibility into all new product initiatives in its global portfolio, enabling the company to allocate resources and prioritise higher-value products.
“The initial results with Accolade have been astonishing,” says Greg Coticchia, CEO of Sopheon. “By focusing on the core elements of innovation and effective decision-making, Mondelēz International has adopted Accolade quickly and has set the stage for transformative innovation processes in the future.”
Find out more about how Sopheon can improve innovation performance at www.info.sopheon.com/consumer-goods-innovation.
This article was originally published in the Spring 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.