Timex advances innovation strategy with Sopheon's Accolade System
Minneapolis and London — June 16, 2006 — Timex Corp., the largest-selling wristwatch brand in America, said it has deployed Sopheon's Accolade as its product- innovation process and product portfolio management solution. Timex recently completed enterprise-wide implementation of the system across all departments and to executive management in a rollout that took approximately 60 days.
Connecticut-based Timex was founded in 1854. It sells more than 30 million watches annually. The privately held company employs 7,500 people at facilities located in the United States, South America, Europe and Asia.
The company operates in a fiercely competitive industry where ever-shorter product life cycles have made continuous technology innovation critical to market success. Faced with the emergence of alternative timekeeping devices such as cell phones, PDAs and computers, Timex has continued to innovate and evolve its core lines while expanding its product portfolio to include multifunction wrist pagers, compasses, heart monitors and thermometers.
Timex said the implementation of Sopheon's Accolade system is integral to the company's adoption of Stage-Gate, the widely used product development methodology. Accolade is being used to automate the Stage-Gate process and to provide decision-making support for management of the company's increasingly complex portfolio of products. A primary reason Timex selected the Sopheon solution is that it is specifically designed to support stage- or phase-based product development processes and has proven its capacity to strengthen process governance and throughput. Other considerations included the software's ease-of-use, its simple configurability and the speed with which it can be implemented.
We set a very aggressive timetable for our rollout of Accolade, said Bernd Becker, vice president of product development at Timex. Given the complexity of the implementation and the level of configuration required, I never expected that Sopheon would finish on time. But they did — in just two months and with no start-up issues. With Accolade in place across our organization, we are doing a better job of managing our R&D investments, and we are fully realizing the benefits of Stage-Gate. Sopheon and Accolade were clearly the right choice.
Andy Michuda, CEO of Sopheon, said, Timex had a clearly defined process and was very savvy about what they wanted to accomplish through our software. As a result, we were able to hit the ground running and, working closely with their team, put a fully automated, world-class innovation system in place in a matter of weeks. For the client, this translates into accelerated time-to-value and a sustainable source of important competitive advantage.
