Tempe, AZ November 28, 2001 When the going gets tough, the tough get together and form a technology alliance.
Or so it seemed this week, which brought news of at least three new partnerships among supply chain solution providers.
Exhibit A: i2 Technologies Inc., Intel Corp. and Siemens Business Services (SBS) announced a new software and service solution for electronic supply chain management.
Known as the "E-Managed Service Chain," the solution combines procurement, logistics, customization, transportation, installation and integration tools into one integrated package. The solution uses i2's supply chain management tools and runs on Fujitsu Siemens servers with IntelPentiumIII processors.
SBS is implementing the multi-million dollar solution globally within Siemens AG.
The solution is currently available to corporate customers in Europe, and it is expected to be available to US-based customers starting in 2002.
Exhibit B: Industri-Matematik International has joined OneSource Information Services' eRM program. Industri-Matematik will integrate OneSource's Business Browser product with its VIVALDI software, which delivers customer relationship management, fulfillment, replenishment and supply chain event management capabilities for retail, wholesale, logistics and manufacturing companies.
"In order to fulfill the potential of e-business relationship management, companies must be able to access up-to-the-minute business intelligence from within their enterprise applications," said Mats Lillienberg, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Industri-Matematik. "Combining the Business Browser product with VIVALDI software will ensure that anyone in a customer-facing role is kept well informed about supply chain availability and better able to anticipate the customer's needs. This will help companies improve supply chain collaboration and lower operational costs."
VIVALDI software consolidates CRM functionality, third party applications and relevant Internet content, including Business Browser comprehensive business information, into a single Web-based user interface. Licensed users will have instant access to all internal information from the CRM applications as well as external information from the Business Browser product, which includes corporate profiles, industry information, trends, stock quotes, news, trade articles, financial data and executive biographies.
Exhibit C: Tonbu, a company that enables dynamic collaboration for distributed product development, inked a strategic partnership with Datacraft, a leading e-business and network systems integrator in Asia.
Under the agreement, Datacraft's e-commerce subsidiary, iSquare Asia, will integrate Tonbu's System-to-System (S2S) Collaborative Product Development Platform into its proprietary, iSquare Collaborative Commerce Solution (iCCS).
iCCS contains a suite of integrated collaborative commerce applications designed to help enterprises standardize business workflows management, optimize value chain management, improve efficiency and increase revenues and better run their businesses.
The Tonbu platform contains a suite of collaboration modules that enable corporations and distributed enterprises to monitor, manage and implement multi-tier projects or programs, workflows and documents across multiple locations and with multiple partners. By integrating this capability into iCCS, iSquare is looking to upgrade iCCS' collaborative technology to better help enterprises streamline and accelerate key business processes across their value chains.
Datacraft Asia, which recently announced it would lay off 230 staff, or about 12 percent of its staff, will also be promoting Tonbu's core competencies in Web-based collaborative software development, process and workflow automation and project management.
