OAKLAND, CA – GT Nexus and Kinaxis today announced a strategic partnership to deliver the industry’s only cloud-based unified planning and execution platform for enterprise customers and business process outsourcing (BPO) service providers.
“One of the biggest challenges companies face today is responding quickly to market changes and risk while simultaneously managing cost as their supply chain becomes more global, more distributed, and more complex,” said Aaron Sasson, CEO of GT Nexus. “The new world of business networks demands tightly integrated supply chain planning and execution.”
While companies have invested heavily in enterprise software and B2B messaging “middleware” solutions to help them optimize inventory and fulfillment strategies, the vision of a fully integrated and responsive supply chain network has remained unfulfilled.
This is because of the enormous information barrier that companies face when trying to make smart planning decisions in the context of highly dynamic and complex global supply chain structures.
“Traditional enterprise planning systems are starved of deep and detailed execution data from third parties – such as inventory positions, lead times, lead time variability, ETAs, and accumulating product cost – that is needed to optimize operations,” said Doug Colbeth, CEO and Chairman of Kinaxis. “It’s like having a brain without a nervous system. You can’t unify planning and execution unless you can get beyond the boundaries of the single enterprise with a system designed to optimize both the flow of information and analysis of data across the entire multi-tier value chain.”
Getting beyond the single enterprise is critical because so much of the data required to make smart supply chain decisions resides with external partners, not within a company’s own internal systems. Aberdeen Research estimates that up to 85% of the data a company needs to gain control over its multi-partner, multi-tier supply chain relies on frequent data sharing among partners in the chain.
To break through, a radically different approach is required. Cloud infrastructure designed specifically for multi-enterprise supply chain management and collaboration is the key enabler. This is not the domain of ERP providers.
The partnership between GT Nexus and Kinaxis combines the best of both companies – the planning and simulation “brains” of the Kinaxis platform with the inter-enterprise execution network of GT Nexus.
Kinaxis provides a single product that powers the underlying capabilities essential to balancing demand and supply across an enterprise. RapidResponse® Control Tower offers a standard foundation on which many strategic business applications — such as supply chain planning, demand management, S&OP, supplier collaboration — can be deployed.