Product Innovation Focus Prompts Cadbury Schweppes to Deploy Sopheon Portfolio and Process Management System

Business Wire, March 7, 2005

MINNEAPOLIS & LONDON -- Food and Beverage Leader Implements Accolade Enterprise-wide to Support Integrated Portfolio Management, Increase Revenue from New Products

Sopheon, the international software and services company, announced today that Cadbury Schweppes, a leading global confectionary and beverage company, has selected Sopheon's Accolade portfolio and process management system to enhance a company-wide integrated portfolio management initiative aimed at increasing growth from innovation. The Accolade deployment spans 45 countries and includes 2,400 users in product development, marketing and commercial strategy. It encompasses all five of Cadbury's operating regions, specifically Americas Beverages; Americas Confectionery; Europe, Middle East and Africa; European Beverages; and Asia Pacific.

One of the largest international confectionery and beverage companies in the world, Cadbury Schweppes employs well over 50,000 people and has an impressive list of popular brand name products, including Cadbury, Schweppes, Halls, Trident, Dr Pepper, Snapple, Trebor and Dentyne. Sopheon's Accolade will be used both to support product portfolio management and to automate and manage the company's implementation of Stage-Gate, a widely-used product development process methodology. The software system will serve as a central repository for product information within business units and across the company. Accolade was chosen because of its ease-of-use, speed and ease of deployment, comprehensive portfolio decision-support capabilities and overall cost-effectiveness.

"Cadbury Schweppes' stature as a leading innovator reaches back over 200 years," said Christine Connelly, chief information officer at Cadbury Schweppes. "We are determined that this commitment to innovation will be as much a part of our future as it has been our past. To maintain our market-leading position, we have outlined an organic growth strategy that relies upon our ability to innovate well and achieve high levels of return on our innovation investments. Sopheon's Accolade will give us the process uniformity and performance consistency we need to enable the sharing of knowledge and expertise across a common process and system platform, ensuring faster time-to-market with winning products."

"The list of 'most admired' companies adopting Sopheon's Accolade system continues to grow," said Mike Connolly, Sopheon's director of sales in the U.K. "Cadbury Schweppes is an industry vanguard with a clear vision of what it takes to drive innovation across geographies, organizational and functional boundaries, and product categories to sustain business success. The company's decision to deploy Accolade reflects and affirms our solution's capacity to handle the critical and unique product-portfolio and process-management needs of food and beverage manufacturers. We are delighted by the opportunity to partner with Cadbury Schweppes in the pursuit of its innovation and business goals."

Sopheon Accolade(R) is a registered trademark of Sopheon plc.

All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.

About Cadbury Schweppes

Cadbury Schweppes (LSE:CBRY) is a major global group which manufactures, markets and distributes branded confectionery and beverage products around the world. With origins stretching back over 200 years, today Cadbury Schweppes' products--which include brands such as Cadbury, Schweppes, Halls, Trident, Dr Pepper, Snapple, Trebor, Dentyne, Bubblicious and Bassett--are enjoyed in almost every country around the world. In 2004, Cadbury Schweppes was voted Britain's most admired company by its peers. It is number one in sugar and functional confectionery, a strong number two in gum and the world's third-largest soft drinks group. For more information, please visit www.cadburyschweppes.com.

About Sopheon

Sopheon (LSE:SPE) is an international provider of software and services that help organizations improve the business impact of product development. The Sopheon Accolade(R) product development system automates gate- or phase-based product development processes and provides strategic decision support that allows companies to improve innovation, cut product development spending waste and shorten time-to-market. Sopheon's Monitor software operates as a "reading robot" that automatically reviews, filters, analyzes and pushes relevant content to healthcare and engineering professionals to enable effective compliance with protocols, standards and regulations. Sopheon is listed on the AIM Market of the London Stock Exchange and on the Euronext in the Netherlands. For more information, please visit www.sopheon.com.