Toronto, Canada September 13, 2001 Computer equipment manufacturer Hewlett-Packard has beefed up its private trading exchange initiative with collaboration and supply-planning applications from Sockeye Solutions, the software provider said in an announcement this week.
Hewlett-Packard Co. has successfully implemented Sockeye's Collaborative Application Framework (CAF) and related Supply Planning and Inventory Planning applications for its private trade exchange (PTX), known as KeyChain.
The computer company, which had 2000 revenues of $48.8 billion, is using Sockeye's applications and collaborative platform in its worldwide private exchange initiative to facilitate trade between HP and its suppliers, contract manufacturers and logistics service providers. More than 60 trading partners including Motorola, Texas Instruments, Flextronics, Tyco and Rohm use Sockeye applications for online direct materials procurement and supplier managed inventory.
Sockeye says Hewlett-Packard has been able to significantly improve the speed of information, materials and transactions throughout its extended supply chain, reducing the speed of materials delivery from weeks down to just a few days or even hours. Positive results from an early implementation led HP to expand the initiative to create a PTX for collaboration among all partners in its extended supply chain and the addition of Sockeye's Inventory Planning application to the KeyChain initiative.
"HP's KeyChain is positioned to be the leading example of a successful trading exchange for collaborative procurement in the years to come," said Vasco Drecun, Supply Chain Research program director at D.H. Brown Associates. "Sockeye Solutions' Collaborative Application Framework enables federated deployment and maintenance of the KeyChain exchange, provides more templates for business protocols including blanket orders and inventory replenishment [and] enables direct feedback on business metrics."
Brian Nickerson, president and CEO of Sockeye, said that HP's PTX "represents one of the first successful implementations of a collaborative supply chain private marketplace anywhere in the world."