Toshiba Europe Goes Into Response Mode

IT and electronics leader deploys software from Kinaxis to meet the challenges of a competitive marketplace

Ottawa, Canada July 13, 2005 Kinaxis Corp., formerly Webplan, a provider of response management solutions, said that Toshiba Europe GmbH has deployed Kinaxis RapidResponse to manage volatile demand and supply to increase customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Toshiba Europe GmbH, located in Neuss, Germany, is the European headquarters for Toshiba Corp. Toshiba, with 161,000 employees and revenues of $53 billion, is one of the largest Information Technology and Electronics companies in the world, and Toshiba Europe GmbH, employs more than 900 with revenues of ¬1.95 billion in the 2003-2004 fiscal year.

Toshiba has sold over 10 million notebooks in Europe to date, and its broad-based product portfolio includes high-performance mobile PCs for professional use, ultra-portables and tablet PCs, notebooks as multimedia or entertainment centers, as well as pocket PCs.

In order to maintain its leadership position in the highly competitive marketplace with product life cycles of three months, shifting market demands and aggressive competition, Toshiba is continuously improving its supply chain processes.

Toshiba Europe GmbH chose Kinaxis RapidResponse to improve the company's ability to respond to changes in demand and supply. In doing so, Toshiba set out to reduce the time required to respond to changes and align demand and supply; reduce the operational workload of processing an increasing number of stock-keeping units (SKUs); share information online across many organizations and functions; and enhance the granularity of information to a higher number of sales territories.