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To ensure optimum performance, companies must work to reduce costs, accelerate operations, and improve quality both in their own processes and in their partner organizations.
By gaining cross-company visibility and control, companies can identify and pursue opportunities for supply chain improvements. Both buyers and suppliers can benefit by collaborating on critical supply chain issues, from initial order through shipping, inventory, and overall management.
The i2 Solution: i2 Collaborative Supply Execution
Allowing companies to manage their supplier interactions in the same system, i2 Collaborative Supply Execution is a comprehensive footprint designed to enable companies to address three major business objectives:
Consolidated procurement across multiple divisions, outsourced business, suppliers, and different material types, including direct and MRO, is critical. It can provide a single system of reference and can link to multiple back-end systems, allowing local processing. The solution can facilitating easier rescheduling, substitution, or transfer of inventory from other locations to meet exception conditions. It also can provide companies with global visibility and tracking of all purchasing, as well as project-based purchasing.
Supply collaboration/lean replenishment can allow companies to manage multiple replenishment modes including lean supply strategies across their supplier base–regardless of size, relationship, or technological sophistication. The solution can allow companies to implement and automate lean supply processes such as vendor-managed inventory (VMI), pull-based (Kanban) replenishment, and other just-in-time (JIT) programs. The solution can enforce process discipline through business rules and allows visibility to complete purchase order life-cycle management.
Collaborative material management can help companies gain greater efficiency by synchronizing and automating the material planning and procurement processes and help them react much faster through rapid “what-if” scenarios and “incremental planning” to changes in demand and supply. The solution is tied with supply planning solutions to automatically execute on recommended schedules, as well as EDC (expedite, de-expedite, cancel) recommendations, thereby removing latency, errors, and grief in synchronizing planning recommendations to actual execution.
Key capabilities of i2 Collaborative Supply Execution can include:
- Closed-loop planning and execution by leveraging rapid re-planning capabilities in advanced planning systems, enabling real-time collaboration with suppliers, providing tools to execute over the web, and monitoring events for proactive problem notification
- Ease of customization and creation of workflows through a visual design studio
- Flexibility and extensibility to re-configure business processes
- Multiple processes and replenishment modes to support multiple replenishment or supply strategies in the same system
- Ease of integration with internal and external systems
Benefits of i2 Collaborative Supply Execution can include:
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Reduced response time to demand changes
- Reduced inventory (raw, work-in-process, and finished goods
- Reduce logistics expenses
- Increased visibility into supply, demand, and inventory, as well as status of orders and shipments
- Increased ability to coordinate with multiple tiers of trading partners
- Reduced supplier stockouts and excess supplier inventory
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