B2B with a twist
The new B2B—back-to-basics—is playing out among vendors with a supply chain management heritage. Once in the thick of the B2B trade exchange movement that largely failed, today's planning vendors are again talking planning, though paired with new solutions in areas such as profit optimization and event management. Also involved in plan processes are some smaller enterprise system vendors that eschew the grander suite vision in favor of a focus on production planning and management.
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/1/2002 6:00:00 AM
5 Invensys
Focus on customer performance
Thinking big hasn't been a problem for Invensys. The controls and enterprise software giant acquired a host of companies over the last few years, building a product portfolio spanning everything from process control to collaborative enterprise applications. But profitability and focus have posed challenges for the London-based company.
Bright spots for Invensys have been its enterprise and industrial automation software solutions, which, due to a recent reorganization, are under the Production Management Division in Herndon, Va. Company leaders are betting that the reorganization, which focuses the company mainly around this division and one for energy management, will revitalize Invensys, which CEO Rick Haythornthwaite acknowledges had become a "sprawling conglomerate" in the recent past.
The Production Management Division boasts several well-known units targeting manufacturers, including Foxboro's process control solutions, Wonderware's plant information management software, and Baan's collaborative enterprise suites. Leo Quinn, the division's chief operating officer, says the division's direction springs from focusing on customer needs.
"Our customers' key challenge, and thus ours, is to optimize the overall supply chain process," says Quinn. "Our value-add lies not just in products that improve each process step, but in solutions that address the steps in-between, to improve the end-to-end process, and drive cash to the bottom line. We offer a unique combination of solutions to optimize that overall process."
At a high level, says Quinn, the division's "killer app" is its "domain expertise embedded in our software and services." But there are specific advances as well. For one, he says, Baan has enhanced its suites for customer, supply chain, and product life-cycle management, differentiating itself by a sole focus on industrial companies, primarily discrete and process manufacturers. Integration also looms large, with Baan's OpenWorld framework making it possible for Baan solutions to plug in with third-party enterprise systems, while Archestra is the integration framework for solutions from Foxboro and Wonderware.
Quinn calls Archestra "one of our big value-adds," not only because it integrates the division's automation solutions, but because it also handles integration with third-party legacy systems and multiple protocols. Says Quinn of the framework, "It's about customer choice."
6 i2 Technologies
Flexible framework for big suite
After making 10 major acquisitions in recent years, supply chain software giant i2 Technologies has been standardizing the look and feel, the architecture, and the integration between its products. Leaders for the Dallas-based company say these steps support an increasingly flexible yet unified approach behind its core goal of delivering value to end users.
"We have changed our internal integration from being a challenge to a strength through our 100-percent adoption of Service Based Architecture," says Duncan Cameron, i2's director of technology solution marketing. "Our J2EE [Java 2, Enterprise Edition] standards-based approach allows our customers to integrate point or suite solutions more readily. Most important, we can reduce the customer's time-to-benefit while minimizing risks.
"We believe that solutions need to be integrated at multiple levels: data, application, and role-based business processes," Cameron continues. "To do this, we utilize best-in-class tools." Cameron says those tools involve alliances with Informatica for data extraction and integration, and with webmethods for enterprise application integration. Standards-based tools also are used for i2's portal solution.
The company has been a leader in the supply chain arena since the space was invented, starting out with planning and optimization solutions, and expanding through acquisitions and development to offer a broad suite of solutions that address supply chain execution, event management, and private trade exchanges.
But in the trying economy of the past year, i2 has found that prospects are more interested in point solutions that can go in quickly and provide a quick return-on-investment. Still, the company continued to invest in product expansion and its integration architecture. Says Cameron, "We haven't cut back on research and development because we want to be there [when the economy comes back] with the best software to deliver value for our customers."
18 Manugistics Group
Profiting from EPO
Manugistics was one of the first software companies to employ advanced mathematical algorithms to optimize supply chain processes. But its first-mover advantage was not permanent: a couple years back, as competitors gained ground, the Rockville, Md.-based company hit a turbulent patch. Now though, Manugistics is back, thanks to once again using advanced algorithms to solve tough business problems.
This time, the algorithms address another prime concern: improving customers' profitability—and quickly, as a bolt-on to existing systems, rather than as a wholesale replacement of them. "The era of quick returns and very defined return-on-investment is here to stay," says Jim Kowalski, a Manugistics executive vice president. "No one is buying into great big projects over a multiyear time frame."
The offering in question is Enterprise Profit Optimization (EPO), the rollout of which is described by Kowalski as "without doubt the major achievement of the last 12 months." The nub of the idea, he explains, has been to bolster the price optimization technology that the company bought when it acquired dynamic pricing specialist Talus, with Manugistics' own supply chain optimization ability. Price optimization plus supply chain optimization, he adds, equals profit optimization.
Throw in the improvements in Manugistics' own supply chain optimization ability, thanks to the acquisition—and, says Kowalski, successful integration—of STG, a supply chain planning vendor associated with the constraint-based scheduling theories of Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, and it's little surprise that Manugistics is presently on something of a roll.
Shipping company American President's Lines, GE Lighting, and Staples have begun implementing EPO solutions, while the company's core supply chain offering has been selected as part of the flagship order-to-delivery project aimed at restoring the fortunes of vehicle manufacturer Nissan.
Manugistics itself needs no such help: sales revenues rose 16 percent in the year ended Feb. 28, an accomplishment in today's tough market. Kowalski says he knows what's keeping Manugistics' sales up: "We're taking things that used to be cost-centers, like logistics or manufacturing, and turning them into competitive weapons."
19 Aspen Technology
Gains market momentum
Over the last several years, Aspen Technology brought together a broad range of solutions for process manufacturers, including asset optimization, supply chain planning, collaborative replenishment, and e-Business applications. And while the Cambridge, Mass.-based vendor may not be evolving quite as quickly as it was a few years ago, it already had an ambitious vision to execute against.
Leaders with AspenTech, the company's nickname, say that execution is coming along just fine. "I'm quite bullish on our future because we're gaining substantial momentum from product introductions, strengthened alliances, and customer wins," says Rainer Gawlick, a senior vice president with the company.
AspenTech leverages technology on at least two levels, Gawlick says. "The first is a pure developmental level, such as Web interfaces, Web access, and working with XML [eXtensible markup language], all of which are necessary to play the game," he says.
The second level is to use that new technology as a means to drive new solutions. "We've gained a lot of momentum in recent months introducing solutions such as capable-to-promise, collaborative forecasting, and PetroVantage, which enables companies in the petroleum industry to establish private trading and logistics networks," Gawlick says. "PetroVantage lets traders make decisions based on current business context."
A strong alliance with consulting giant Accenture also bodes well for AspenTech. "Expanding this relationship has a huge impact because it establishes AspenTech as a key technology supplier for manufacturing and supply chain management in Accenture's chemical and downstream petroleum business," Gawlick says.
But what about the sputtering economy? AspenTech believes its solutions will play well in tough times. "Now more than ever, operational efficiency is imperative for process manufacturers," Gawlick says. "Since we offer key knowledge, proven solutions, a partnership with Accenture, and have industry leaders as customers, business looks very good."
21 SAS
Focused analytical toolkits
Got data? Need answers? For 25 years, SAS Institute has been enabling manufacturers to sift data in search of insights—knowledge that can be used to improve yield, resolve production problems, or eliminate downtime. Trouble is, performing those analyses often called for skilled power users: manufacturing or quality engineers with a penchant for figures.
So the company's drive over the past few years has been to simplify the process with a series of standard analytical toolkits that can be fed with data from enterprise, quality, and manufacturing execution systems to produce decision support more easily digestible by executives and functional managers. Last year was no exception, says Donna Fulenwider, an SAS senior director, with the launch of "new analyses for supplier optimization, customer profitability, demand planning, and inventory replenishment." In addition, says Fulenwider, SAS' performance management capability has been extended with solutions for supplier relationship management, risk management, and human resources management.
For the immediate future, this approach drives SAS. For example, the company plans to launch the semiconductor industry's first yield execution solution. Fulenwider says this application will give "engineers, operators and managers an integrated view of the data they need to manage the risk of planned and unplanned engineering changes in the semiconductor fabrication process."
From the technology perspective, Fulenwider says, SAS Release 9.1 will use Java and .NET technologies to support key Web services standards as they mature.
In addition to focused analytics driven by initiatives such as Six Sigma, manufacturers turn to SAS for broader business intelligence solutions. Such applications lie on top of an organization's operational systems to form an "intelligence layer," says Fulenwider. "SAS can extend the return-on-investment from an organization's operational systems by providing the intelligence to make sense of the data from those systems," she adds.
47 ILOG
The unseen force
If the MSI Top 100 was based on the number of individuals using a vendor's software, ILOG might top the list. While ILOG's software is widely used, the vendor doesn't claim all of its users as its own.
That's because ILOG, Mountain View, Calif., garners more than half its revenue from independent software vendors (ISVs) that embed ILOG's technology into their applications. ILOG technology has long been popular with supply chain management software vendors. In fact, ILOG boasts that a majority of the top 10 supply chain vendors have ILOG optimization engines powering their applications.
In total, more than 350 ISVs have embedded ILOG components into their applications. Recently, a growing number of ISVs—as well as individual companies that build their own applications—have been adopting ILOG's business rules engines. ILOG sells two such engines. One, called ILOG Rules, is for developers who create applications in C++. A newer version, called ILOG JRules, is for building Java-based applications.
"Over the past 12 months, we have seen increasing penetration of our business rules engine into multiple markets, supporting our leading position in the supply chain management space, as well as in the telecommunications and financial services industries," says Christian Deutsch, general manager of ILOG's value chain management division.
That trend has boosted ILOG's percentage of revenue from its business rules components to 30 percent of total company revenue, a 100-percent increase from a year ago.
One reason for that fast growth, says Deutsch, is ILOG business rules components allow companies to design business processes that mesh with today's business environment. "Extending business processes via the Internet to customers and suppliers is the next technology push," he says. "This will require that the business processes embedded inside applications be adapted to the real-time enterprise. ILOG business rules technology allows manufacturers to harness their business processes and maximize corporate assets."
73 Transentric
Hosted event management solutions
When it comes to keeping track of the location of goods in supply chains, Transentric can point to an impressive lineage. The St. Louis-based provider of supply chain event management solutions is a subsidiary of Union Pacific, a legendary name in railroading. While the Transentric name has been around only since 2000, the company has been providing solutions since 1987 as part of UP Technologies.
"Our expertise is one reason we've been around a long time," says Jim Damman, Transentric's president and chief operating officer.
With customers watching every penny, technology investments have to generate return quickly—a situation that Damman says provides his company with another advantage, particularly during recessions.
"We are an application service provider," Damman says. "Because of some of the e-commerce capabilities that we've developed during the past 15 years, we can process a couple of million transactions per day through our e-commerce engine. And, we have the ability to hook up trading partners and inter-enterprise systems quickly, delivering value faster than most of the competition."
Transentric's products include shipment and equipment visibility software; business systems integration technology, including its own value-added network (VAN); and inventory visibility solutions. Damman points to the release of Itemvision, its software offering in the latter category, as one of the highlights of the past year.
Damman acknowledges that selling in a tight economy has been difficult, but sees hopeful signs. "I'm beginning to see daylight with prospects," he says. "Instead of us going to them all the time, more are coming to us."
75 Demand Management
Forecasting strength, and greater openness
Demand Management sets itself apart by concentrating on, well, demand management—including what it touts as the world's most widely used forecasting solution for manufacturers and distributors. But there are new directions as well for the St. Louis-based vendor.
The company has been busy rebuilding its products using Java from "front to back," according to Tom Gielow, vice president of technology. "We have Java applets that are downloaded into the browser, Java Enterprise at the server level, and JDBC [Java database connectivity] for database access.
"Our goal was to make the system as open as possible," Gielow continues. "Companies can be on an Oracle database, DB2, Sybase, or using SQL Server on Intel, Sun, Linux, or UNIX. It will work in any environment as long as it's Java-compatible." The new demandsolutions.net solution, featuring the open architecture, will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.
"We also have been enhancing the functionality of our product, incorporating industry best practices and responding to requests from our customers," says Gielow. Many of those new requirements are gathered from Demand Management's on-line customer support center.
Demand Management sells its product as a way to upgrade a legacy manufacturing system or enhance an enterprise resources planning (ERP) system when its forecasting module is not up to the task. Forecasting is not one of the stronger modules in a typical ERP suite, often including only enough basic functionality to justify the name. This leaves an important niche for vendors such as Demand Management to fill.
Demand Management's product suite also includes support for vendor managed inventory and replenishment. Additionally, it recently introduced a "what-if?" capacity planning tool called DS Rough Cut. So while the vendor has strength in forecasting, its product lineup also addresses several other areas.
77 Logility
Broad suite, proven track record
You won't see a lot of headlines from Atlanta-based Logility that trumpet the advent of collaborative supply chain planning and execution solutions. In part, that's because the company doesn't try to keep pace in the hype wars.
But the bigger reason may be that Logility has been in the collaborative solutions space for several years. "We implemented our first collaborative supply chain solution in 1997," says Mike Edenfield, president and CEO. "Last summer, we introduced our fourth-generation product. We have more deployments and more experience in collaborative supply chain projects than anyone."
As befits a mature product, Voyager Release 6.5 offers all the functionality one would expect in a Web-based collaborative supply chain management solution. Lesser known, however, is the extent of Logility's solutions footprint in areas such as warehouse and transportation management, wireless-enabled supply chain event management, collaborative promotions management, collaborative sales & operations planning, and more.
"What differentiates us is the breadth of our fully integrated supply chain management suite and the fact that we can implement quickly," Edenfield says. "Sometimes, prospects find it hard to believe that we can actually achieve substantial results in less than six months," he continues. "Our message is that it doesn't have to be so difficult, and here's a list of customers that you can speak to about tangible results."
While most of that list consists of Fortune 500 giants, because Logility offers packaged solutions, rather than a toolset, its software suits mid-market companies well. "We also offer broad platform support for Windows 2000, and UNIX, and we're the premier supplier for the IBM iSeries platform," Edenfield adds.
80 SynQuest
Vertical focus keeps gorillas at bay
It's easy to get trampled by the big boys in the supply chain planning space. "We know we're not going to unseat an 800-pound gorilla with a one-size-fits-all solution," says Ron Nall, executive vice president of product development at Atlanta-based SynQuest. "Our approach is to specialize in vertical markets where we have the products and expertise to add real value."
Another differentiator is what SynQuest calls financial optimization. "A lot of products can help you source an order," Nall says, "but we don't stop until we find the lowest-cost solution that meets the customer's requirements. It's all about taking an order, doing it wisely, and making a profit."
In January, the company rolled out SynQuest 7.0, a suite of collaborative planning solutions. Enhancements included improvements to the dynamic sourcing engine, new functionality focused on product-line profitability analysis, material substitution, returnable container packaging, advanced supplier collaboration, and performance upgrades.
"Our Inbound Planning Engine continues to get attention," Nall says. "It coordinates the flow of materials from several thousand suppliers to arrive at just the right time for manufacturing or assembly. It was developed with Ford to meet automotive industry requirements, but it also meets the requirements of most rate-based manufacturing environments."
While SynQuest targets large manufacturers with complex supply chains, that doesn't mean its customers want complex implementations. Says Nall, "They want us to work with whatever disparate systems they have in place, implement in six months or less, and deliver substantial value."
The key technology that ensures fast implementations is the software's open, data-driven architecture. "It connects easily to anything from legacy systems to Internet-based applications, and lets our customers use data on-hand to model and solve problems without custom programming," Nall says.
88 Software PM
Stresses basics in manufacturing software
New representational name or not, and added functionalities notwithstanding, Milwaukee-based Software PM still stresses the basics in its MPM II enterprise system.
MPM II, now represented and supported by Ottawa, Canada-based NOTRAsoft, targets small manufacturers with a closed-loop solution supporting manufacturing resources planning functions and concepts. The system—which runs on IBM's iSeries server platform—focuses on core integrated planning and transactional functions including order management, master scheduling, material requirements planning, and shop floor control.
President Jim Sciano says that his company's approach is "the only way of the future in the new and realistic economy. Users will not tolerate nor buy hype any longer. They will need and will demand practical, price-value software that can be implemented and learned quickly, with a corresponding swift return-on-investment."
Yet Software PM isn't static in its offering. During the past year, MPM II enhancements have included what Sciano calls additional "surrounding" modules, plus new product alliances supporting computerized maintenance management software, shipping software, and report writing. Additionally, the company is developing multiplatform support, and looking to further its IBM product alliance in the e-Business and applications hosting areas.
But the company is sticking to its straightfoward, "no nonsense" approach, Sciano insists, saying, "MPM II has always offered this, and we expect even more future recognition and success based on this."
91 webplan
Solutions for the real-time enterprise
First there were supply chain planning vendors, which steadily added multiple types of planning solutions. Some of these vendors then expanded into aspects of execution. Newport Beach, Calif.-based webplan Corp. has followed this path, though company leaders add that they focus on enabling the "real-time" enterprise.
"Accelerate the business model while decreasing costs and reducing cycle-time at each step," says Dave Haskins, executive vice president of development. "That's what a real-time enterprise does."
Haskins is convinced solutions that act in near-real time is where the market is headed. Enterprise resources planning (ERP) systems, he adds, can't meet this challenge. "ERP [solutions] don't consider dynamic changes from customers to suppliers," he says. "It's not responsive enough."
At the core of the vendor's solutions is webplan CeO Server, a configurable, event-driven planning engine that supports a variety of planning algorithms. Launched in June was Constrained Order Scheduling, a real-time order promising solution with configurable business rules.
Previously released was Manufacturing Insight (MI), a supply chain planning and visibility solution. Richard Wiens, product marketing manager, calls MI "a 100-percent pure-Web personalized supply chain planning and management portal that allows individual users to access data they need, and leverage all the functionality of our planning engine through a Web interface."
Though lesser known than the huge supply chain planning vendors that have developed broad suites, webplan considers itself to be a player in this space. Says Haskins, "[the market] is pushing more toward vendors with integrated suites."
93 Mercia Software
Tight planning in a tight economy
Supply chain planning provider Mercia Software has concentrated technology development during the past year in enhancements of its Collaborate suite. This is an Internet product that allows trading partners to collaborate on demand forecasting including, for example, replenishment planning.
"Generally speaking, the market worldwide as we see it now has some pent-up demand for such systems," says Gareth Brentnall, an executive vice president with the U.K.-based vendor, which has its North American headquarters in Atlanta. Manufacturers are concerned, he says, "that inventory is too high and service is too low. So they're looking for a way to fix that problem quickly, and without spending millions of dollars."
Technology focus in the next year or two will continue on demand and inventory planning enhancements. A key area is service parts functionality, of which Brentnall says Mercia is working with General Motors (GM) and Quantas Airlines to enhance the statistics and the math behind the applications, particularly in regard to long-term demand planning.
"[GM] needs to ensure parts provisioning so that it doesn't get left with obsolete inventory, nor run out of parts before demand runs out," says Brentnall. As a buyer of service parts, Quantas devises plans for which spares to hold in inventory, and where they will be held.
Mercia's Collaborate suite, says Brentnall, is heavy on demand planning and inventory planning functionality. "People are responding well to that because we have a solution to a problem they have," Brentnall says. "They can justify the implementation because it's very straightforward and simple."
He sees this more targeted approach as appealing after an era in which manufacturers "bought into the big suites, with a lot invested in modules not implemented."
98 Silvon Software
Closing the performance management loop
Silvon Software has followed a path that parallels the evolution of manufacturers' decision-support needs. The Westmont, Ill.-based vendor, which today offers business performance management analytic applications, grew out of the business intelligence software space, and lately has added exception management capabilities to its product footprint.
Founded in 1987, a major turning point for the company was its decision in 1999 to increase its focus on packaged analytics with the introduction of its Stratum suite, says Mike Hennel, CEO. While Hennel says Silvon's move into analytics actually began in the early 1990s, Stratum took the trend to a new level, offering packages that address supplier management, customer management, and manufacturing.
"As we looked at how to add more value beyond analytics, we identified and addressed the need by our customers to expand their supply chain visibility," says Hennel. "To meet these needs, we've enhanced Stratum to help our customers measure key performance indicators, to share and collaborate with their external supply chain partners, and to develop a process for managing events."
But Hennel says Silvon isn't morphing into an event management vendor. "We don't consider event management a separate category, but an overall feature of supply chain management," he says. "What separates Silvon from other vendors is that we provide a closed-loop environment that integrates analytics with planning and management functionality. This allows our customers to analyze and determine what they need to do as a result of internal or supply chain-related events."
99 Categoric Software
The event management engine
Notice all the enterprise and supply chain software vendors touting event management? Chances are at least some of them have gotten the underlying technology from Categoric Software Corp., a Leesburg, Va.-based vendor of event management and alerting software.
Categoric offers an event management and notification engine called Xalerts that enterprise or supply chain execution software vendors add to or "OEM" into their own offerings. The list of such partners for Categoric includes Aspen Technology, LIS, and TECSYS.
"We believe our direction is the right one in today's market," says Thorgeir Einarsson, co-founder and CEO. "Virtually every major ISV [independent software vendor] has announced, or is delivering, event management in their solutions. Categoric is the right engine for many of these vendors."
Categoric does list some end users as direct customers, however, the main focus is on the ISV channel. "Our value proposition is that these companies can have event management in their products far more quickly, and at lower expense, than building it themselves," Einarsson maintains. "Xalerts allows the vendor to have an advanced event management engine today, enabling them to focus their resources on what they do best—enterprise applications for their target markets."
Einarsson says Xalerts offers a number of advantages, including alert delivery to nearly any device, and two-way communication that lets users respond to alerts from any device. The engine's Java architecture supports multiple platforms, including UNIX.
Says Einarsson, "When processing and sending events and alerts to a large number of users, a Java-based solution will perform better than alternative technologies."
100 SKYVA International
Infrastructure and value chain apps
With a growing need among manufacturers to become more flexible and responsive, the time seems right for SKYVA International. That's because the Medford, Mass.-based vendor combines a flexible e-Business applications infrastructure with value chain functionality.
"We offer an entirely new model for developing and deploying value chain applications," says Guenther Moeckesch, CEO. "Whether you're trying to reduce costs, or looking to improve visibility into demand, managing dynamic business processes that can be distributed across real or virtual enterprises is a complex challenge. SKYVA simplifies the challenge by providing for the definition, execution, and coordination of global business processes through a set of distributed functions deployed as intelligent agents."
SKYVA offers buy-side functions including collaborative procurement and supply aggregation; sell-side functions including order fulfillment, vendor managed inventory, configuration, and service after-sale; and internal capabilities such as planning and scheduling.
Applications are assembled from a "services-based" architecture. Moeckesch says this features reusable, preconfigured software components with flexible, rather than "hard-coded," interfaces.
With such an architecture, Moeckesch says, "a company can rapidly deploy end-to-end functionality across its value chain, and with the same application infrastructure, publish those applications as Web services. If a company simply wraps Web services around its existing applications, its system will not be flexible enough to meet changing business needs."
SKYVA targets global 2000 companies. Moeckesch says deployments typically stay within a one-to-one services-to-license ratio, and in one user analysis, the architecture was credited with reducing implementation resources by 40 percent.
Partnerships are important to the company. One major relationship is with industrial automation giant ABB, which owns 53 percent of SKYVA. ABB also uses SKYVA's technology in internal supply chain projects. Last October, SKYVA signed an agreement with IBM, under which IBM will use portions of SKYVA's application development products as part of its WebSphere e-Business infrastructure software.
Other partnerships include one with Openshop Holding that initially offers a collaborative transportation management solution, and one with enterprise system vendor AP Automation + Productivity for real-time factory scheduling. The alliances, says Moeckesch, "reinforce and validate the strength of our products and more firmly place SKYVA as a top-tier software company."
It's business according to plan
07/01/2003Solutions Spotlight
01/31/2004Will performance trump visibility?
10/01/2002
