Greenwood Village, CO and Los Angeles January 15, 2002 For some companies the sooner the dive into collaborative forecasting is taken the better.
That's why DigiTerra Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of CIBER Inc., and Adexa Inc., a provider of collaborative supply chain planning solutions, have developed Rapid Collaboration (RC). RC is a methodology designed to implement Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner (CDP) product quickly for companies with annual revenues of $500 million and below.
According to a statement released by DigiTerra and Adexa, RC facilitates an accelerated implementation combining standard industry templates and a solution center for efficient product configuration. A combination of hardware, software and services, RC is an implementation approach that, the companies claim, addresses the full implementation cycle and typically does so in less than half the average implementation time.
"With our customers shifting focus from traditional forecasting to collaborative demand management, a tool was needed that would allow them to perform this in a streamlined manner over the Web," said Davison Schopmeyer, vice president and practice leader for DigiTerra's supply chain practice. "Based on our joint expertise of the supply chain industry and enterprise application technologies, [DigiTerra and Adexa] developed the Rapid Collaboration methodology."
CDP is easily configurable with intuitive navigation and administration through a point-and-click interface, which reduces the need for large IT infrastructures to support implementation and company-wide rollout. Besides its interface for analyzing and managing demand data and automated monitoring and messaging for out-of-tolerance events, CDP also has an open architecture that supports integration with enterprise resource planning (ERP), advanced planning systems (APS), customer relationship management (CRM), or legacy systems.
"Rapid Collaboration addresses a specific business issue unique to mid-market companies the need for rapid and cost effective implementation of a powerful collaborative forecasting tool," said Mark McKean, director of Adexa's mid-market alliance program. "DigiTerra's knowledge of demand planning combined with their strong technical and project management skills were a perfect fit for our CDP product."
