Westlake Village and Aliso Viejo, CA November 13, 2001 Need2Buy and Efinity Inc., announced this week that they have signed a merger agreement and will now operate under a new name: RiverOne.
As a result of the merger, the newly formed company will offer a suite of software solutions, created from Need2Buy and Efinity's individual solutions, to address the need for real-time interactivity among trading partners across distributed electronics industry supply chains.
According to Nima Bakhtiary, RiverOne's president and chief operating officer, these software solutions are designed to improve a range of critical activities, including design review, sourcing, planning, forecasting, order lifecycle management and inventory management. "The rapid adoption of outsourcing has created costly communication gaps and extended information lead times among supply chain participants. The addition of Efinity's solutions helps position us to resolve these emerging issues, she said. "To address these supply-chain challenges, companies must be able to share information and respond to changes in real time this requires interactivity, which RiverOne's B2B applications deliver."
From supply chain information exchange to performance metrics, all RiverOne solutions are provided in a private, controlled environment. "Efinity recognized early on that the hosted delivery mechanism was the most efficient and cost-effective way to deliver 'outside the four walls' collaboration software," said Chris Smith, Efinity's founder, who will become executive vice president of RiverOne. "RiverOne takes the potential of hosted solutions to the next level by allowing spontaneous communication throughout the entire electronics product lifecycle, thereby enabling supply-chain partners to make faster and better decisions."
RiverOne's has a software suite, called INTERactive, that is designed to manage direct materials throughout the product lifecycle, including design review, sourcing, procurement, order lifecycle management, planning and inventory management. The business information for these processes is securely transmitted through RiverOne's eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based CrossStream technology, which acts as a translator and supports EDI, RosettaNet, BizTalk and other emerging communication standards. In addition, the RiverOne solutions can be deployed on a standalone basis or together with other applications from the INTERactive suite so customers can adopt individual capabilities one step at a time.
