San Francisco, February 15, 2002 It's been a tough and costly task for the oil, gas and chemical industries to integrate telemetry data from real-time monitoring systems with batch-oriented business systems. However, MarbleLogic Inc., a provider of collaborative portal solutions; and UNIREX Corp., a supply chain event software engineering firm, announced that they have partnered to create Unipoll Plus, an integrated supply chain solution for managing liquid inventories.
According to the companies, UniPoll Plus integrates analysis and business intelligence reporting facilities with critical back-office business systems. UniPoll Plus also allows customers to graphically analyze bulk fluid inventories and tank telemetry data, access and manage workflow routes used to generate wireless alerts and reports, and translate requests into business transactions, all via a standard browser.
UniPoll Plus customers include the continuous process industry, chemical producers, bulk terminal managers, air products suppliers, and distributors of fuels and lubricants.
Traditionally, such bulk commodity inventories have presented problems for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and manufacturing execution systems (MES), since these are designed to control discrete processes utilizing fixed units of measure. Additionally, cross-function reporting from tank facilities to production/distribution systems remains difficult and, in some cases, is non-existent. Embracing emerging chemical industry eXtensible Markup Language (XML) standards such as CIDX, UniPoll Plus is designed to serve as a unifying solution to these disparate systems and processes and to answer the on-demand needs of a geographically diverse user population, according to the companies.
UniPoll Plus helps our customers constantly monitor, analyze, report and respond to inventory changes. In today's market it's critical for suppliers to be able to closely manage inventories and effectively communicate status throughout the supply chain, said John Cason, chairman and CEO of UNIREX. With the help of the Internet, UniPoll Plus keeps all participants in-the-loop at each stage of the process, which can be a bottom line advantage to producer, supplier and end-customer alike.
