Kinaxis Introduces Next Generation Response Management to Help Companies Respond More Effectively, Immediately to Volatility in Supply, Customer Deman

Ottawa, Canada, (PRWEB) June 19, 2007 -- Kinaxis™ Inc., the global leader in Response Management solutions that provide visibility and coordinated response to change for manufacturing and fulfillment organizations, today announced RapidResponse 9, the next generation of its market leading Response Management solution.

RapidResponse empowers front-line decision makers to make the tradeoffs and compromises necessary to respond to unexpected events in increasingly volatile global supply and fulfillment networks. Manufacturers value the ability to analyze alternative response actions before making a decision on a major tradeoff. RapidResponse is in use at many of the world's leading global brand owners and eight of the top 10 electronic manufacturing services providers, driving breakthroughs in customer service and operating performance.

"In high-volatility, supply-constrained businesses, the new basis of competition is the ability to
peer faster than your competitors into the black box of multiple planning and execution processes, running offline scenarios that give collective, rapid visibility to financial and service impact of a short list of viable decision alternatives," said supply chain research director Stephen Hochman, in a recent AMR Research article. "The defining vendor in this area, Kinaxis, simply calls the category Response Management. Whichever name you choose, those that develop and deploy this distinct class of capabilities report step-function improvements in cost and time to resolution of high-visibility judgment calls."

RapidResponse 9 includes the following innovations:

Compress Time to Resolution Through Proactive Event Monitoring and Alerting
•RapidResponse 9 introduces new event-based monitoring and alerting capabilities that allow users to recognize and respond to business exceptions and opportunities in real-time to drive greater efficiency of business operations
•Response Management requires rapid action in the face of frequent unexpected changes in demand, supply and product. With RapidResponse 9, users are driven by exceptions rather than inspection, allowing all RapidResponse users to know when unexpected events occur sooner and fostering more rapid resolution to problems
Users can easily create their own alerts (e.g., notify me if any orders are going to be more than 2 days late, or notify me if our on-time delivery % drops below 95%) and define when and how they would like to be alerted
•RapidResponse 9 Message Center centralizes all alert management and viewing

Respond Faster and More Accurately by Quickly Engaging the Right People
•Response Management empowers people to respond quickly and accurately to unexpected change by making the right tradeoffs, compromises and course corrections. In a global, distributed organization, decisions are often made without fully understanding their impact or tapping into the right people that have the domain expertise to determine the best course of action. RapidResponse 9 introduces a breakthrough in people-centered collaboration with RapidResponse TeamForm™
•RapidResponse TeamForm automatically detects who in the organization would be impacted by or could provide insight to a proposed action, ensuring the right people are quickly engaged in formulating responses. By quickly engaging the right people, response times are shortened and actions more accurate
•As action teams are formed to collaborate, conduct "what-if" analysis and respond, contextual information is shared with each team member so they can quickly contribute. And, as dispersed action teams collaborate and determine the best action to take, commitments are tracked so everyone understands the course corrections being made

Reduce Supply Chain Risk by Monitoring and Avoiding Inventory Liability
•In an outsourced manufacturing environment inventory is often shared between multiple parties. In today's heavily regulated financial reporting environment, inventory liability is a material supply chain risk between brand owners and contract manufacturers. The root cause of inventory liability claims is change
•RapidResponse Inventory Liability Manager 9, an optional application, integrates the proactive management of inventory liability directly into the Response Management process. Inventory Liability Manager allows both brand owners and contract manufacturers to proactively monitor and measure liability exposure using waterfall charts and reports to understand the impact of proposed response actions
•Inventory Liability Manager 9 stores historical inventory data allowing organizations to report on and conduct comparative analysis of inventory exposure. It also includes the ability to track high-water mark liability to determine the level of liability of a component within its lead time
•Using supply contracts, brand owners and contract manufacturers can easily determine liability at the purchased part with minimal data required. Using demand contracts, brand owners and contract manufacturers can determine liability to the component part

Existing systems are not meeting the market need for dynamic flexibility. RapidResponse extends the capabilities of Enterprise Resource Planning systems and transcends Advanced Planning Systems, which are not geared for high-value business tradeoffs that require human intervention. Spreadsheets are used frequently but lack the required scalability, become quickly dated and result in multiple versions of the truth. Business Intelligence systems are not real-time in nature and are structured for insight rather than execution.

"The drive toward perfectly optimized forecasts and supply plans is no longer enough to support complex global supply chains - responding to change has become the new operating paradigm with demand-driven leaders and a competitive necessity for all," said Randy Littleson, vice president of marketing at Kinaxis. "RapidResponse 9 connects myriad internal and external systems to allow for rapid sensing and resolution of major business tradeoffs and significantly raises the bar with innovations that drive faster, collaborative response that balance opportunity and risk."

RapidResponse 9 will be available globally by the end of this month.

About Kinaxis
Kinaxis delivers an on-demand Response Management service for visibility and coordination to drive rapid response to constant change across global supply and fulfillment networks, resulting in breakthroughs in customer service and operating performance. Kinaxis RapidResponse combines multi-enterprise visibility, collaborative "what-if" analysis and rapid decision support to empower front-line manufacturing and fulfillment teams to take quick and effective action when faced with constant changes in demand, supply and product. Global leaders such as Casio, Honeywell, Jabil, Raytheon, Solectron and Benchmark Electronics use Kinaxis RapidResponse to empower their supply networks with superior responsiveness and gain competitive advantage. For more information, visit the Kinaxis web site at www.kinaxis.com or the company's blog at blog.kinaxis.com.

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