Each year, Managing Automation magazine selects manufacturers who have achieved distinction in mastering the business models and processes necessary to compete in today's global marketplace. This year, one of Sopheon’s long-standing customers, Glatfelter, has been selected to receive the prestigious 2007 Progressive Manufacturing 50 award for its performance excellence in the category of product innovation.

Glatfelter, a $986 billion supplier of specialty paper and engineered products, had a product portfolio that reflected only 10-15% truly "new" products. Facing commoditization of its core lines and a mature / declining market, Glatfelter began examining new R&D processes and associated tools that would help the company create new, commercially viable, profitable products.

To achieve its objectives, Glatfelter instituted its "CLEAR" initiative, a company-wide project dedicated to improving the company's performance in product innovation and new product development. The goals of this initiative were to:

1)      Increase the amount of revenue generated by new products;

2)      Reduce the time required to bring new products to market;

3)      Reduce the number of new products submitted to development that either never make it to market or fail to meet their revenue and profit objectives following commercialization;

4)      Increase the number of viable new products released to the market; and

5)      Increase the number of offerings to new, nontraditional markets.     

Glatfelter has spent the past five years implementing the CLEAR initiative - and it has transformed the way in which the company develops products. For example, Glatfelter has adopted new process methodologies; hired several additional product development, business development and sales professionals; and implemented Sopheon's Accolade® innovation process management system to automate its product development process and provide a portal for innovation projects and cross-functional communications.

The results of this concerted effort are impressive. In the past three years, Glatfelter's over half of the company’s total net sales have come from new products. In 2006 alone, Glatfelter generated more than $500 million in sales from new products out of total sales of nearly $1 billion. And $200 million was generated from markets that Glatfelter was not in at all in 2001, a record of expansion into specialty segments that few, if any, other manufacturers in the global paper industry can rival. Since initiating the CLEAR project and implementing Accolade, Glatfelter has also successfully:

• Reduced average time-to-market by 25%.
• Decreased the number of new product failures by 55%
•  Increased the number of new product introductions by 500%.

According to Scott Mingus, Global Director of New Product Development for Glatfelter, "The CLEAR project and Accolade have revitalized our product development project portfolio. Another important effect is that product development has ceased to be strictly a technical function and has become an integrated part of our business planning process. The overall impact of this project has been to dramatically increase new product volumes and success rates. It has been the principal driver of Glatfelter’s emergence as the leading provider of specialty papers in the world."

If you would like to learn more about Glatfelter's implementation of Accolade, click here.

For more on the Progressive Manufacturing Awards, go to www.managingautomation.com/maonline/magazine/.