Adexa Goes Global

New solution aims to join strategy and planning with execution and monitoring across the enterprise

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Los Angeles  September 24, 2002  Enterprise software company Adexa this week took a step beyond its traditional supply chain planning focus by rolling out a new solution that aims to join strategy and planning with execution and monitoring across corporate functions.

Adexa says the 11 solutions that comprise its newly launched Enterprise Global Planning System (eGPS) offer companies the tools they need to define their corporate supply chain goals, model or plan the supply chain necessary to meet those goals, monitor the execution of those plans and notify appropriate stakeholders in the event of problems so they can reoptimize the supply chain.

Historically Adexa has provided supply chain planning (SCP) software, and in fact the company claims it is the largest privately held SCP vendor in the world, with customers primarily in discrete manufacturing sectors such as automotive, aerospace and electronics, as well as inroads into the consumer packaged goods, soft goods and chemicals verticals, among others.

Companies in those industries use planning tools like the Adexa solution to create supply chain models, effect plans over multiple horizons using those models, collaborate with various constituents, internally or externally, to get input on the plan and then reoptimize as necessary.

The new solution takes eight-year-old Adexa beyond its supply chain planning roots and outside the operational side of the enterprise where the provider has traditionally played. "We have been getting a lot of pull to go cross-enterprise, into the financial side, into sales and marketing, because those areas of the enterprise need to do similar planning," said Darryl Praill, senior vice president of marketing for Adexa. "eGPS integrates strategic, financial and supply chain planning with execution and measurement."

The new eGPS solution supplants the provider's iCollaboration solution. "That renaming reflects a multitude of things," Praill said, "not only the fact that the solution has grown in depth and breadth over the years, but also the current state of buying behaviors and what companies are demanding from us as far as solutions."

The eGPS solution includes updated versions of nine existing Adexa solutions: Sales, Operations and Inventory Planning (SOIP), Product Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain Planning, Factory Planning and Scheduling, Collaborative Demand Planning, Collaborative Supply Planning, Order Fulfillment, Supplier Management and Order Lifecycle Management.

New to the Adexa lineup are Corporate Planning, and Event Management and Analytics. Corporate Planning is intended to allow CxO-level executives to review their enterprise's key performance indicators (KPIs) on a regular basis  say, quarterly or yearly  compare those KPIs with others in their industry or with best-in-class companies, and identify their weak areas  say, a high cost of goods sold (COGS). The solution helps expose the operational issues affecting their weak areas, for example, showing that poor supplier performance and poor forecasting are resulting in higher inventory and clearing costs, thereby increasing COGS.

Then the other planning and management solutions are supposed to help the executives fix the problems, while the collaboration solutions allow stakeholders to communicate with one another regarding plans. The Event Management and Analytics solution monitors the execution of the plan, alerts executives in the event of a problem and helps the company dynamically rework its supply chain plan to get the enterprise back on course to meet its goals.

Cyrus Hadavi, Adexa's president and CEO, says that his company is not aiming to replace current supply chain event management systems, although he views those solutions as inadequate because they typically do not go beyond providing messaging capabilities between a company and its suppliers.

"Event management has to have some level of intelligence to help users identify what is relevant," Hadavi said. "If a supplier says that it is going to be three days late, wonderful, but what does it mean? Am I going to be three days late to my customers, or maybe it doesn't matter because I wasn't going to need those components until three days later."

The Adexa solution provides the analytics and planning capabilities necessary to determine the impact of a supply chain event and plan an effective response, Hadavi asserted. In essence, the solution is intended to provide a continuous business planning feedback loop.

Adexa is selling the new solutions, which are available immediately, either as a hosted solution or under a traditional enterprise software licensing model, and the different components are available separately, on a modular basis. Praill said that the average selling price for the solution is about $750,000, although the exact figure varies substantially depending on the customer's requirements, depth of integration with other systems and similar factors.
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