Businesses face serious challenges in today’s competitive economy. Production and supply chain costs must be controlled, without sacrificing speed and output quality. Product must be brought to market more quickly and efficiently than ever before. To build and preserve customer satisfaction, companies must deliver both innovation and responsive service.
To meet those challenges, businesses need a new and more capable generation of supply chain technology. They need IT solutions that accelerate inventories and process cycle times, which help control costs, and that support improved customer service. Now a new generation of solutions has emerged.
The i2 Solution: The i2 Agile Business Process Platform
The i2 Agile Business Process Platform is a finely tuned, synergistic development suite designed to support new-generation supply chain management solutions. This new-generation platform functions much like a “factory”, in which standardized application components such as data models, business rules, user interfaces (UI), and business workflows can quickly be assembled and then adapted to meet company-specific business and market needs. The platform can bring greater speed, agility, quality, and cost-efficiency to any supply chain.
This agile platform approach enables closed-loop management principles and ultimately accelerates communication between planning and execution. It incorporates transactional processing capabilities and delivers enterprise-class scalability. The platform includes a layer of technology services such as XML data, process and UI modeling, a rules-based programming language, as well as business process management services.
Comprehensive Services
The i2 Agile Business Process Platform reflects more than 15 years of technical innovation learned from hundreds of implementations, and today represents the leading edge of the supply chain management evolution. It can be used to support a wide range of i2 offerings, from industry reference models for complete supply chain optimization, to solutions for collaborative supply execution, sales and operations planning, vendor-managed inventory, inventory and forecast optimization, and more.
The platform makes up a comprehensive environment for supply chain management application development, including:
- Core platform services. Including distributed process modeling, execution and monitoring, business rules definition, and web and rich-content UI generation.
- Data services. With extensive supply chain data models and processes for validation, synchronization, staging, and aggregation.
- Integration services. From bulk data transport and mapping to web services support for messaging and generic EAI.
- Application development. With a proven studio environment for the integrated development, modeling, testing, deployment, and maintenance of new solutions.
Enhanced Functionality
The i2 Agile Business Process Platform supports new-generation supply chain management solutions by providing the service-based and event-driven technical foundation that is necessary to achieve appropriate levels of reactivity, flexibility, and low-cost production that today’s business conditions require. The Agile Business Process Platform monitors, filters, analyzes, and correlates business messages and events for real-time synchronization of supply chains. Packaged with an industry-proven supply chain management reference library of application components such as data models, business rules and workflows, user interface templates, as well as back-end integration patterns, this platform will inherently facilitate development and management of advanced supply chain management processes for visibility, planning, collaboration, and execution—along with communication to the exiting IT landscape.
Key features of this solution include:
Business content library
The business content library provides the building blocks that enable companies to quickly compose and orchestrate specific, highly-focused supply chain processes. New-generation solutions such as i2 Customer Order Fulfillment, i2 Collaborative Supply Execution, and i2 Supply Chain Visibility are assembled with these building blocks. The building blocks cover architectural aspects of a business application including data models and data rules; integration patterns; business workflows and rules; and graphical user interfaces.
For example, one building block contains an inventory balancing functionality that is shared across i2 new-generation solutions as one of the exception-resolution mechanism. Another building block contains supply chain management event management such as real-time net change, typically used for detecting changes in inventory position or product mix.
Componentization and a service-oriented architecture
Componentization drives flexibility and speed while facilitating assembly, integration, and the extension of IT-based business processes. i2 new-generation solutions support the move toward a more standardized, flexible, and cost-efficient IT environment.
Out- of-the box supply chain data models for manufacturing and retail
The platform comes packaged with supply chain management data models capable of describing the entire extended supply chain of a manufacturing or retail domain. These data models serve as the common language between i2 models and are also global enough to support external module communication. Likewise, the packaged data models provide a springboard to develop custom business processes.
IT investment protection
Unlike traditional integrated development environments where several technologically mismatched modules must be used, the
i2 platform uses a single light-weight technology base, so it blends easily with a heterogeneous IT environment and existing applications. This technology can enable the construction and adaptation of supply chain management business processes. The platform naturally complements enterprise platforms such as IBM Websphere, .NET, SAP NetWeaver, and BEA Weblogic.
Benefits
of the i2 Agile Business Process Platform can include:
- Faster supply chain process composition and adaptation leading enabling continuous process improvement practices.
- Reduced total cost of ownership of supply chain management applications
- Lower implementation risk due to rapid and iterative development and deployment approach
- Simplified service integration through service-oriented architecture and workflow management
- Naturally complement and extend existing IT investments in i2 and other applications.
- A mature, optimized IT infrastructure for a “real-time enterprise”
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