Amitive Launches First Supply Chain Software Suite for Brand Owners Who Outsource Manufacturing

Amitive, Inc., the pioneer of Community Supply Chain Management (C-SCM), recently launched Amitive Unity, the first supply chain management (SCM) suite purpose-built for both large and mid-sized brand-centric companies who outsource manufacturing. Only Amitive Unity is suited to a new class of companies whose core competency involves brand management and product design, and who focus on supply chain excellence as a competitive advantage.

Amitive Unity is a C-SCM software suite that enables "brand owners," who outsource production to third-party contract manufacturers, to drive a continuous synchronization of demand and supply capabilities across all partners. The first solution in its class to free organizations from manufacturing-centric constraints, it optimizes community-centric variables, including lead times, shared capacity and quantities. Amitive Unity enables the new generation of brand owners to stay ahead of shifting market demands and focus on market-driven requirements, such as faster product velocity across a global supply chain community. Compared to traditional manufacturing-centric SCM solutions, whose primary function is asset utilization, Amitive Unity delivers the much-needed visibility into business processes and event synchronization across its distributed community of partners. Delivered as a software as a service (SaaS) solution, Amitive Unity ensures simple implementation, use and maintenance by all community members.

"Brand owners need better visibility into and control of the outsourced supply networks, but current technology options are not up to the task," said Bill Swanton, Dineli Samaraweera and Eric Klein in the April 2005 report "Contract Manufacturing at a Crossroads: Brand Owner Need for Visibility."

"A new breed of supply chain professionals is working in lock step with brand and product management, while also driving product velocity, market responsiveness and cost effectiveness across its outsourced partners. But software vendors have failed to keep pace with rapidly advancing business practices, so few companies have been able to reap the full benefits of today's outsourced manufacturing model," said Amar Singh, chief executive officer of Amitive. "Instead of trying to twist existing SCM software to meet this growing challenge, Amitive built a completely new solution that is easy to integrate with existing technology infrastructures. Executives across a number of industries are excited about moving from their home-grown spreadsheets to Amitive's all-in-one solution for intelligently leading their supply chain community."

"Traditional supply chain software could not enable Mitsui to maximize product velocity across our supply community to support a JIT outsourced manufacturing environment," said Marc Bialt, Manager SCM and logistics solutions at Mitsui USA's High Tech Division. "Amitive, with its on-demand, web-based community supply chain management approach, has helped us efficiently manage a diverse community of trading partners and reduce inventory."

About Amitive Unity: Community Supply Chain Management (C-SCM) Software Suite

Amitive unifies cross-community business processes within a single solution that is easy for all partners to implement, use and maintain. The software enables brand owners to collaborate with trading partners to plan, source, inventory and fulfill products -- and manage the risk inherent in these processes -- across the entire trading community.

Amitive Unity consists of three core components -- Amitive community hub, community business process management, and the patent-pending demand/supply synchronization engine -- which are the foundation for an integrated suite of business process management applications. The entire solution is delivered as a configurable SaaS platform to provide anytime/anywhere access via a web browser, as well as minimal set-up, training and maintenance time for all supply community members. Business experts and IT professionals can easily install, configure and update the solution, and with capabilities such as Web 2.0 usability, configurable business rules and processes, and personalization through role-based dashboards, Amitive Unity can be exactly configured to support a community's business processes.

Community Hub: The Amitive community hub is the central transactional data hub that supports community planning, execution and collaboration. It complements and integrates with each partner's existing supply chain and accounting/ERP software, giving brand-focused companies and their partners access to real-time, cross-community transactions and visibility into everything from incoming orders and updated forecasts to pricing data, inbound-outbound inventory and purchase order status. The community hub provides brand owners with the visibility they need to make faster, better decisions. With greater confidence in their supply chain information, they can drive inventory out and product velocity up for greater customer satisfaction and company profitability.

Demand/Supply Synchronization: Unlike traditional factory-centric SCM optimization engines, which model physical assets and fixed constraints, Amitive's patent-pending demand/supply synchronization engine continuously synchronizes supply and demand across a community of trading partners. When demand or supply signals change -- for example, due to an updated customer order or shifting supplier-related interdependencies -- supply chain professionals can update community collaboration requirements in net-change, incremental runs. This practical optimization approach means that supply/demand plans can be updated faster and with greater frequency than traditional SCM solutions allow, and revised plans are less disruptive to the entire supply community.

Community Business Process Management: Amitive Unity provides end-to-end business process management and real-time, cross community visibility that customers and members of the supply community can subscribe to and implement in a modular approach. This includes:

• Community Forecast Management - aggregates customer forecasts by product, by supplier, over time. Forecasts can be submitted automatically via electronic messages (e.g. EDI, RosettaNet, etc.), via spreadsheet or CSV file upload, or manually by direct entry via the community console. Brand owners can "scrub" them before completing a more detailed demand plan and then distribute forecasts by product, by customer to suppliers.
• Community Purchasing - facilitates purchase order creation and execution between the brand owner and the supplier community, providing collaborative capabilities when there is a gap between requirements and supplier capabilities. Includes adjustable template-based documents for all PO types, while also managing shipping and receiving tolerances.
• Community Inventory Management - eliminates the silo approach to managing inventory by owner, customer or supplier, delivering truly real- time, consolidated inventory visibility across the entire supplier network.
• Community Order Management - provides a flexible means to streamline orders coming in from multiple customers on multiple product lines, taking into account any number of pricing factors (e.g. volume pricing, contract pricing, etc.) Includes unique views for the customer, brand owner and supplier, and supports collaborative processes (e.g. approvals, rejections) down to the signature level.
• Community Fulfillment & Logistics - closes the planning and ordering loop by managing the last mile to the customer's door. By facilitating and providing visibility into everything from "pick/pack/ship" to inbound/outbound shipment details, Amitive Unity lets brand owners respond quickly and accurately when customers want to know where their package is.
• Community Invoice Reconciliation - facilitates invoice reconciliation via three-way matching, speeding payment and increasing cash flow.

For more information, visit < ahref="http://www.amitive.com/mi-products.html" target="new"> www.amitive.com/mi-products.html.

About Amitive
Amitive is the pioneer of "Community Supply Chain Management" software, which provides brand owners who outsource manufacturing with on-demand, continuous synchronization of supply and demand across a broad, disperse supply chain community. Unlike traditional SCM solutions which optimize against hard manufacturing constraints, Amitive unifies business processes on a single application, enabling supply chain professionals to collaborate with trading partners in real-time and gain end-to-end visibility across the entire trading community. Amitive helps customers to lower inventory and capital requirements, manage business risk, boost product velocity and enhance customer service levels. Visit www.amitive.com for more information.

SOURCE: Amitive, Inc.