Collaborative application vendor Agile Software Corp. announced earlier this week the next version of its Product Chain Management software.
The Agile 8.0 Product Chain Management solution is made up of three separate suites: Product Sourcing, Product Collaboration, and Product Sourcing and Improvement.
In its sum total, the PCM suite is designed to manage products through every phase of the product profit cycle.
The 8.0 upgrade involves enhancements to the sourcing and collaboration suites.
The Product Sourcing solution is actually the first two applications in the suite–New Product Sourcing and Product Cost Management. Combined, the apps allow manufacturers to quickly establish optimal supply networks and engage in business with a large supply base.
The applications offer a costing functionality to enable manufacturers to reduce their cost of goods sold and leverage multiple tiers of supply chains to understand current and future product costs. Likewise, results of sourcing activities can be pushed to transactional systems for planning and execution purposes, according to Agile officials, in San Jose, Calif.
The Product Collaboration 8.0 suite is the latest release of Agiles flagship product. Key enhancements include an Internationalization application that provides multilingual capabilities, a clustering capability that enables multiple servers to act as a single eHub to increase performance and reliability, and an advanced graphical workflow that can be configured to individual business processes.
Also, a new capability in the Web client enables users to update bill-of-material information, allowing collaboration on more than 200 document types, according to Agile officials.
The PCM suite is available now.