San Jose, CA February 27, 2002 Magnified by the current economic climate, today's global manufacturing model depends on flexibility and cost management as the key competitive differentiators. That's why Agile Software, a provider of product chain management solutions, this week announced the general availability of its Agile 8.0 Product Chain Management (PCM) suite, which includes the Product Sourcing and Product Collaboration 8.0 solution suites.
According to Agile, its PCM suite is designed to manage products through every phase of the product-profit cycle, such as material costs, the rapid introduction and improvement of products to meet market demand, and productivity and product-quality improvement.
Agile said that because the direct materials sourcing process needs an accurate and timely description of what product is being purchased or manufactured, the Product Sourcing solution in the PCM suite is designed to provide that description. As products change during the sourcing process, the solution makes those changes visible to all parties involved so that the right parts are sourced and suppliers can provide competitive terms.
In addition, Agile's Product Sourcing solution is designed for both centralized and decentralized enterprises. Manufacturers can leverage direct materials spend across geographies, business units, products and programs. It also provides a platform for manufacturers to leverage and analyze sourcing intelligence gathered across the supply chain and in the market at large, according to Tim Minahan, vice president of Aberdeen Group.
As for the Product Collaboration 8.0 suite, Agile stated that it adds value for manufacturers that use the Agile solution to communicate and collaborate in real time internally and with external suppliers and partners about product content. Some of the functions of the suite are internationalization, which extends the Agile solution across the global enterprise for collaboration; clustering, which enables multiple servers to act as a single e-hub; online viewing and redlining for collaboration; advanced graphical workflow; and distributed administration.
