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Business planning software maker Adexa Inc. announced today the availability of a new suite of tools to address an emerging market: enterprise performance management.
EPM is a set of applications and processes that combines goal setting and alignment with planning, forecasting and modeling capabilities, according to Adexa.
Adexas Enterprise Global Planning System [eGPS] encompasses 11 modules: Corporate Planning, Event Management, Sales, Operations and Inventory Planning, Product Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain Planning, Factory Planning and Scheduling, Collaborative Demand Planning, Collaborative Supply Planning, Order Fulfillment Supplier Management and Order Lifecycle Management.
The Corporate Planning software identifies financial opportunities and links them to business strategies. The goal is to help users set overall corporate objectives in the areas of capital-intensive equipment, direct and indirect inventory and materials and people.
Event Management and Analytics monitors a catalog of more than 600 performance indicators and provides real-time results and alerts of unexpected changes and trends.
SOIP coordinates internal departments, such as sales, marketing and operations with a single plan. It also balances supply and demand across the supply chain to optimize inventory allocation.
The PLM module manages all stages of a product, including design, engineering, sales and marketing, manufacturing, distribution, as well as the products end-of-life cycle.
Generating a supply-chain model to synchronize supply with demand, the SCM module optimizes the network of supply-chain resources through forecasts and customer orders. At the same time, Factory Planning and Scheduling creates plant-level production plans.
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The CPD module maintains a real-time view of demand, allocations and consensus forecast based on data from customers, marketing and sales.
Meanwhile, CSP maintains an up-to-date view of constrained and unconstrained supply plans and from that produces aggregated plans that can span a companys business units. This helps users negotiate better contracts and support sourcing, Adexa officials said.
Accelerating the execution of order fulfillment, the Order Fulfillment module calculates product availability and accurate delivery dates based on supply-chain status information.
The Supplier Management module, meanwhile, looks to streamline the procurement process through the creation of a multi-tier supplier network.
Collaboration across a multi-tier supplier network is enabled through Adexas OLM module. Users can also track individual orders and propagate a demand signal based on an orders BOM [bill of materials], sourcing rules and allocation rules.
The eGPS suite is built on a business application framework that combines both planning and execution. It consists of a browser-based client, standard Web servers and J2EE compliant app components, officials said.
Adexa supports connectivity to EAI [Enterprise Application Integration] and B2B Tools from IBM WebSphere and Vitria Technologies Inc.
Adexa has gone through a bit of shape-shifting over the past year. In March of last year, the company announced an upgrade to its iCollaboration Suite that focused on supply-chain planning.
The upgrade included expanded buy-side, enterprise and sell-side applications for order management and procurement.
The company meant to grow from there.
However, around mid-summer 2001, Adexas planned merger with e-marketplace provider and software maker FreeMarkets Inc. went belly-up.
But in February of this year, over cocktails, Adexa executives decided to move beyond supply-chain planning to enterprise planning, or making decisions at a corporate level to fit with corporate objectives, according to Darryl Praill, senior vice president of marketing at Adexa.
In June of this year, Adexa took its new show on the road, announcing its enterprise performance management vision to analysts.
Adexas eGPS software is available now.