Las Vegas — May 15, 2003 — Supply chain solution provider i2 has formed an alliance with tech company Sun Microsystems to offer a joint service and parts management (SPM) solution.
The joint solution, combining i2's Service and Parts Management with Sun's Solaris operating system (OS), is designed for manufacturing, aerospace, high-tech and automotive companies, the two providers said.
The solution is intended to provide strategic maintenance planning to optimize asset uptime and maintenance costs, strategic spares planning to balance the tradeoff between cost/budget and service level, tactical spares planning to enable daily spares planning, and tactical labor planning to optimize labor allocation.
"Our SPM solution has become a cornerstone for many customers as they work to improve customer service levels and optimize inventory levels for service and aftermarket parts," said Pallab Chatterjee, i2 president for solutions operations.
Service and Parts Management, pre-configured and pre-tested on Sun hardware and software, is available to customers with consulting, training and support services from Sun and i2.
Jack Palmadesso, of the information technology group at Siemens PG Americas, noted that resource optimization is an extremely high priority at his company, and the joint i2-Sun solution provided a "steering wheel" for navigating through all the planning and decision-making that goes into stocking inventories for servicing new plants.
"Having accurate forecasts of our parts needs can save a lot of waste in inventory and provide a much better picture of where our expenditures should go," Palmadesso said.
For more information on solutions for the service and support chain, see the articles "In the Field and All Grown Up," the Net Best Thing column in the June/July 2002 issue of iSource Business, and "Time to Prove It," the Net Best Thing column in the April/May 2003 issue of iSource Business.
