03/03/2004

E2open, an inter-company process integration software developer, debuted the E2open Supply Chain Coordination Solution, which the vendor says “enables companies to implement advanced supply chain processes, such as multi-tier visibility, continuous demand/supply planning and multi-party vendor managed inventory (VMI).

“Customers such as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Seagate Technology and Solectron have standardized on and are in production using E2open as their next-generation approach to significantly reduce the cost and complexity of managing inter-company direct material processes.

“In a separate announcement today, IBM detailed its plans to use of E2open to boost the performance of its manufacturing supply chain with its top suppliers, which together represent more than 85 percent of IBM's annual manufacturing procurement expenditures.”

E2open continued: “Electronics companies today increasingly outsource critical aspects of their operations to their trading partners, forcing them to manage complex end-to-end processes across multiple supply chain tiers. Early adopters have been forced to piece together disparate and immature technologies to attempt to manage these inter-company processes, but such projects have failed to deliver business value due to high costs and long deployment timeframes. To overcome these hurdles and benefit from integrating processes with partners and customers, leading companies are implementing Multi-Company Process Management (MCPM) strategies.

“E2open's Supply Chain Coordination Solution -- delivered on demand as a service -- lowers the costs and accelerates the time to achieve true MCPM capabilities, enabling companies to gain significant business value, including better visibility and coordination with trading partners, increased responsiveness to customer requests and improved ability to rapidly react to market changes and new business opportunities.”

"Companies today depend on their supply chain partners more than ever and synchronizing the plan and coordinating the supply chain execution across the extended supply chain have become a priority for companies," said Vinay Asgekar, in the AMR Research Alert, Sept. 26, 2003. "Inter-enterprise supply chain coordination (ISCC) is the process that arose to support these endeavors. It incorporates demand collaboration, supply collaboration and supply-demand alignment processes, with exception management capabilities at its core. With supply chains only being as efficient as the weakest link in the supply chain, exception management and coordinated execution among the partners have major effects on the cost and delivery performance."

E2open points out that its solutions “are designed from the ground up to solve the unique problems associated with managing inter-company supply chain processes. Key features of the E2open Supply Chain Coordination Solution include, IN THE VENDOR’S WORDS:

• Support for Next-Generation Inter-Company Processes: E2open provides the industry's only solution to enable companies to achieve true multi-tier visibility and multi-party VMI. The solution also supports additional inter-company process areas such as demand/supply planning; collaborative planning, forecast and replenishment (CPFR); and automated procurement, including order and invoice management. E2open's innovative inter-company workflow capabilities enable companies to deploy and change these processes quickly and cost effectively.



• Comprehensive and Integrated: E2open's solution is a complete, integrated solution that combines all the necessary elements for inter-company process integration, enabling companies to avoid the pitfalls of having to integrate and manage functionality and services from multiple vendors. The solution includes a highly flexible B2B integration platform for managing supplier integration; a proven slate of on-boarding options, tools and methodologies for trading partner enablement; a proactive exception-based management system to help trading partners jointly define, monitor, escalate, and resolve critical supply chain exceptions; and built-in reporting and analytics tools to help business users track and monitor key performance indicators.



• Delivered On Demand: E2open's solution is delivered on demand as a service to speed deployment and help companies avoid the high costs of initial implementation and ongoing application and change management. The solution is backed by a global service level agreement (SLA) that assures application execution, performance and delivery.

"Executives today are frustrated by the high cost and complexity of traditional supply chain deployments that have failed to deliver their promised business value," said Greg Clark, E2open president and CEO. "E2open is helping its customers overcome the limits of these custom, point-to-point approaches, and together we are establishing a new standard for Multi-Company Process Management that fundamentally changes the economics of inter-company process integration."