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Case Study

Brewing Excellence:
Lion Captures the Essential Ingredient with Accolade®

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Background

LionCo Logo

Lion is a leading beverage company headquartered in Sydney, Australia. With origins dating back over 180 years, Lion is known for its commitment to quality, craftsmanship, community, and sustainability. Lion is a pioneer in brewing and continues to innovate across a range of adult beverages. Its core beer portfolio includes many locally loved brands in Australia and New Zealand, such as XXXX, Little Creatures, James Squire, Stone & Wood, Emerson’s, Speights, and Panhead, and a growing craft beer presence in the US, having brought New Belgium and Bell’s Brewery into the fold. Lion also has an enviable portfolio of NZ wine brands, a premium fine wine business in North America, a craft spirits distribution arm in Australia in Vanguard Luxury Brands and Yarra Valley-based Four Pillars Gin. Lion employs close to 4,000 people across its markets.

Opportunity

Lion’s innovation process was chaotic and heavily manual. Their previous system lacked local support, leading to low adoption rates. Maintaining and consolidating data required much effort, which was inefficient and time-consuming. Teams were scattered across various spreadsheets, struggling to pull together data consistently and timely.

Lion needed a solution that could:

01

Centralize and streamline their innovation data management.

02

Provide robust reporting capabilities to meet the demands of the Integrated Business Planning (IBP) process.

03

Integrate seamlessly with existing tools, particularly Microsoft Power BI.

04

Offer a user-friendly solution with single  sign-on functionality.

WELLSPRING'S

Approach

Wellspring’s (formerly Sopheon) Accolade provided a comprehensive solution to Lion’s challenges by:

Centralizing Data

Accolade streamlined and centralized Lion’s New Product Development (NPD) and non-NPD projects, creating a single source of truth for all innovation data.

Enhancing Reporting Capabilities 

The integration with Microsoft Power BI allowed Lion to generate comprehensive and efficient reports. 

Improving Efficiency

Accolade reduced duplication and manual work by eliminating the need for multiple disparate tools.

Offering Local Support

Wellspring (formerly Sopheon) provided exceptional local support, a critical factor in their decision-making process. 

Results

Implementing the Accolade system at Lion has helped streamline and centralize NPD and non-NPD projects to ensure one source of truth. It has also increased their project teams’ efficiency by reducing the duplication and manual work required to populate gate papers for our Stage-Gate process and approvals. The system’s robust features, local support, and integration capabilities have proven crucial in helping Lion maintain its market share in the dynamic FMCG industry.

“Sophoen (now Wellspring) was great in offering industry best practice advice on how we could optimize our process & bring it back in line with best-in-class Stage Gate execution. The Wellspring team was also very patient and accommodating, working with us through a period of change and many moving goalposts.”
Innovation Planning ManagerLion

Innovation Management

Wellspring's flagship product suite in the IM market. Accolade is trusted by hundreds of leading companies worldwide to drive superior business performance through innovation.

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