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Innovation
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Innovation
Acorn has a long history of innovation, starting from the company’s inception in 1996 and continuing through today.
Innovation from Acorn has come in the form of:
• Leading methodologies
• Unique software capabilities
• Thought leadership
• Packaged best practices that deliver meaningful customer results
Acorn’s people, domain expertise, technology and partners make Acorn the world’s leading profit improvement company.
We deliver proven and meaningful results for our clients.
Here is a summary of the innovation we have brought to the performance management space:
| 1996 |
| Methodology: Acorn Founder Steve Anderson creates fast-track profit modeling and analysis service methodology to quickly and dramatically improve clients’ bottom lines. This methodology forms the basis of Acorn’s proven Profit Path Implementation Methodology TM which has been used successfully by over 250 clients.
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| 1997 |
Methodology: Steve Anderson conceives the time-driven activity-based costing methodology. It enables transaction-level, “bottoms-up” costing, profitability, and resource capacity/utilization analysis for any dimension of a company’s business in a unified model.
Software: Acorn delivers the first software product on the market designed for transaction-level analysis. It is used for pricing quotes, and analyzing the profitability of an order in “real-time” using ABC data as an input. This product, called Quick Quote, formed the basis for Acorn’s focus on the transaction as the key driver of cost and profitability analysis.
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| 1998 |
Methodology and Thought Leadership: Discovered the role that capacity plays in overall cost and profitability. Acorn Founder Steve Anderson discovers the inter-related role of business process modeling for cost, revenue, and capacity insight.
Software: Quick ABC Software Tool is developed and released to the market. First and only tool on the market to incorporate the use of the time-driven ABC methodology to perform “bottoms-up” cost and profitability analysis.
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| 1999 |
| Best Practice and Methodology: Acorn packages industry templates to fast track the model building for like-industry clients, decreasing the time to implement and time to achieve profit improvement for clients in several market sectors by 80%.
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| 2001 |
Software: Acorn releases first server-based version of its enterprise-scalable costing and profitability software solution
Thought Leadership: Dr. Robert Kaplan, Harvard Business School and Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, joins the Acorn Board of Directors to contribute to the company’s strategic direction and solution offerings.
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| 2002 |
| Best Practices: Acorn teams with a private equity firm to perform rapid pre-deal analysis of M&A acquisitions, performing cost and profit modeling and analysis to validate the financial return potential of a target company.
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| 2003 |
| Software: Acorn releases its first fully web-enabled version of its enterprise-scalable costing and profitability software solution, which was architected for the complex and scalable demands of the Global 2000.
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| 2004 |
Thought Leadership: Acorn Founder and Chairman Steve Anderson and Harvard Business School Professor Dr. Kaplan co-author Harvard Business Review article titled “Time-Driven ABC, A Simpler and More Powerful Path to Profit Improvements” Published by Harvard Business School Press.
Best Practices: Acorn combines its software and methodology to quantify the profit improvement impact its solution has on bottom line results of customers.
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| 2005 |
| Software - Enterprise Scalability: To accommodate the needs of a F500 US-based retailer, Acorn successfully deploys one of the world’s largest costing and profitability solutions - over 60 TB. It analyzes the cost and net profitability of every SKU in every store, every month, and is validated to the company’s general ledger.
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| 2006 |
| Software - Pricing Analysis: Acorn releases Price Analyzer, a pricing analytics solution which uniquely provides indirect cost, cost-to serve and pricing analytics to the customary price-waterfall and demand-side of the market.
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| 2007 |
Thought Leadership: Acorn Founder and Chairman Steve Anderson and Harvard Business School Professor Dr. Kaplan co-author book Time-Driven ABC, A Simpler and More Powerful Path to Profit Improvements, published by Harvard Business School Press. 13 foreign publishers buy rights to republish the book in different languages.
Best Practices - Short Time-to-Value: From Acorn’s collective client experiences, Acorn develops Industry Value Accelerators for 5 core industries, packaging best-practices for profitability and costing models and a road map for where and how to capture profit improvement. Acorn proves time-to-value benefit by deploying with a customer in 30 days.
Software: Acorn’s best of breed solution is chosen by SAP to be its costing and profitability management solution on a global resale basis. Acorn’s application is fully integrated to the SAP environment to support this SAP-offered solution.
Best Practices - Meaningful Results: Acorn teams with a private equity firm to perform rapid cost and profit modeling and analysis to enhance the financial return of an acquired company. Acorn innovation assists with a 3x EBITDA improvement within 15 months following acquisition, creating over 3x shareholder value increases.
Software: Acorn packages its expertise and best-practice competency in the measurement of supply chain costs, flow paths and trade-deal funding into a solution called Supply Chain Analyzer.
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| 2008 |
| Thought Leadership - Global Marketplace: Time-Driven ABC book reaches the global marketplace via published versions in 11 languages to date.
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