Horsham, PA November 1, 2001 Verticalnet Inc., an enterprise software provider, announced that MasterBrand Cabinets Inc., an operating unit of consumer products company Fortune Brands, has selected Verticalnet's eXtended Enterprise Management (XEM) Sourcing Management Solution. To better leverage consolidated spend across its operations and improve company-wide collaboration through enhanced enterprise-wide data visibility, MasterBrand Cabinets has deployed Verticalnet Spend Management and Visibility Portal applications.
Designed to leverage existing enterprise transaction systems and provide "non-intrusive" access to key spend data, Verticalnet's Spend Management application will be used by MasterBrand Cabinets to centralize the company's view of overall spend; cleanse data into an actionable format; improve purchasing efficiencies by targeting savings opportunities and supporting the means to achieve them, and monitoring the results. The Visibility Portal will provide MasterBrand Cabinets with visibility across the company's operations, suppliers, distributors and customers.
"We were looking for an enterprise software provider with a tool capable of giving us visibility into data on purchases spread throughout our distributed network of manufacturing locations," said Richard Forbes, president, MasterBrand Cabinets. "After a survey of the market, we chose Verticalnet's solution because of its powerful data collection and reporting capabilities, its non-intrusive architecture that fully leverages our existing architecture, and the ability of its analytics to support our strategic procurement strategies."
"We are seeing more and more manufacturers, such as MasterBrand Cabinets, move beyond transactional e-procurement tools toward applications that support strategic procurement decision-making," said Chris Larsen, Verticalnet's executive vice president of global field operations and marketing. "Leveraging Verticalnet's sourcing management solution, MasterBrand Cabinets will be able to gain visibility into data from diverse operations with a level of comprehension that would previously have required substantial changes to their existing systems or a rigid, complex data warehouse infrastructure. Our solution will allow MasterBrand Cabinets' procurement staff to fully leverage their company-wide spend to produce measurable savings and improve supplier performance."
