Atlanta — April 9, 2003 — Viewlocity, a provider of supply chain planning and event management solutions, today rolled out the latest version of its Supply Web Application (SWA), adding features for adaptive supply chain execution.
According to Viewlocity, the Adaptive Execution feature in SWA 4.2 was designed to streamline an organization's ability to address supply chain exceptions by enabling users to collaborate and resolve these exceptions through predefined workflows and business rules. This feature also allows for the routing of supply chain exceptions to community participants for handling and resolution.
In addition to providing a predefined set of industry and business specific workflows, the Adaptive Execution feature also enables users to customize and configure new workflows for the resolution of alerts and exceptions within their own supply chain roles.
SWA 4.2 extends the alert notification functionality of earlier versions by providing two-way wireless, multi-modal communication support. This feature enables companies to establish and distribute automated, interactive voice and text communications simultaneously through the recipient's wired or wireless device of choice (i.e. phone, fax, e-mail, pager, PDA or other wireless devices), as well as drive subsequent actions through preconfigured or custom workflows.
The Data Cleansing feature in SWA is intended to alleviate end user concerns about the reliability, validity, integrity and completeness of their data based on primary and secondary (i.e. trading partner) data sources. As records are added, Data Cleansing enables organizations to: apply a validation process that can identify data patterns and discrepancies based on predefined business, sequence or structure heuristics; manually or automatically resolve data quality and integrity problems; and submit the "clean" data for processing.
The data cleansing feature provides the ability to handle various data formats (i.e. dates, strings) and to prepare information for matching through parsing and standardization.
SWA 4.2's Supplier Management feature is designed to facilitate a user's ability to capture contract information and compare it to actual supplier performance. In conjunction with event management, Supplier Management enables evaluation of supplier compliance with negotiated contracts and makes the same information available to suppliers, according to Viewlocity.
The feature provides supplier scorecards, allowing companies to collect supplier performance information from disparate enterprise systems and create scorecards to measure supplier performance.
Contract and scorecard maintenance functionality allows companies to maintain contract information, which may include company-specific performance criteria (e.g. service levels, on-time shipments, quality, etc.) along with category weightings, resulting in an overall supplier rating. Supplier performance management features are designed to let users identify and track supplier performance trends.
Additional enhancements available in SWA 4.2 include cross-domain event handlers, forecast alerting, key performance indicator (KPI) alerting and improvements to the user interfaces.
