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NASHVILLE, Tenn.—IBM has announced a four-year contract with CEVA Logistics, a global supply chain management company, to accelerate business delivery results for CEVA’s customers through a new cloud-based information exchange for its supply network.
Announced at the IBM Smarter Commerce Summit 2013 here, this solution is a combination of CEVA’s technology and an element of IBM’s SmartCloud portfolio for specific lines of business such as supply chain.
For its part, CEVA presented a series of best practices for other enterprises to live by at the IBM event, which ran May 19 through May 23.
By improving the quality of information shared across its customers’ supply chain networks, CEVA speeds material and information flow to reduce costs and improve customer service. CEVA estimates the IBM and CEVA solution will help the company reduce IT-related supply chain costs by upward of 5 percent over the course of the four-year contract, resulting in potentially several million dollars in savings that can be directed toward developing new supply chain offerings for customers.
CEVA serves leaders in the automotive, consumer, retail, health care, pharmaceutical, industrial and technology sectors. Through its Smarter Commerce initiative, IBM is helping CEVA streamline its customers’ supply chain and logistics processes with technologies that make it easier to access, share and process information in real time.
“Market conditions are driving requirements for visibility and control across global operations,” said Peter Dew, chief information officer for CEVA, in a statement. “IBM’s cloud integration services provide us with a world-class, reliable and constantly available information backbone to deliver the real-time access to information we need. CEVA, and our customers, benefit from IBM’s expertise and the power of the cloud to ensure that, at every link in the supply chain, we can keep business flowing.”
Built on IBM’s leading cloud business-to-business (B2B) integration service and the CEVA Matrix Connect solution, the new cloud service delivers a competitive advantage for CEVA’s customers by enabling them to quickly and efficiently respond to market and customer changes. CEVA Matrix Connect automates the flow of information to accelerate business processes involving multiple parties, including customers, suppliers, service providers and other partners. For CEVA Matrix Connect, IBM Sterling B2B Integration Services provide process management for all B2B and electronic data interchange transactions. By combining its 30 plus years of experience with enhanced visibility, robust tools and governance processes, IBM ensures all transactions are handled more quickly and comprehensively, the company said.
Moreover, with the new IBM-based initiative, CEVA is able to reduce operational and development costs, more easily migrate existing B2B activity to the new cloud solution, provide rapid customer onboarding, and rapidly scale as business and volumes increase.
“In today’s increasingly digital world, supply chain leaders such as CEVA are delivering competitive advantage to their customers by sharing critical information across their vast supplier networks quickly and efficiently through the cloud,” said Craig Hayman, general manager of IBM Industry Solutions, in a statement.
IBM officials said Big Blue’s cloud service will enable CEVA to better manage the supply chain for an automotive customer by helping it maintain and monitor low inventory or accelerate shipments. This same approach is applied to CEVA customers in the consumer and retail, health care and pharmaceutical, industrial, and technology sectors.
The IBM system also ensures that documents are sent and received within an agreed time frame, working proactively with the customer to resolve any issues. This can be an important customer service deliverable. For example, for some clients in its fastest-growing consumer and retail sector where CEVA manages order fulfillment, the company must provide frequent delivery information on product shipments, IBM said. This document expertise also reduces order, price and invoice errors.
IBM Sterling B2B Integration Services is part of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, which is designed to help companies manage their supply and demand processes through intelligent automation. This solution is also part of IBM’s growing SmartCloud portfolio of more than 100 cloud-based solutions.