webMethods Links the Supply Chain With Demand-Driven Solutions
November 14 2005 - 8:30AM
PR Newswire (US)
Leverages Industry-Leading Service-Oriented Architecture and
Business Activity Monitoring Capabilities to Bring New Levels of
Adaptability and Predictability to Demand Fulfillment and Sales
& Operations Planning ATLANTA, Nov. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/
-- INTEGRATION WORLD 2005 -- webMethods, Inc. (NASDAQ:WEBM), a
leading business integration and optimization software company,
today unveiled the company's first series of solutions that are
exclusively designed to help enterprises become demand driven by
fully leveraging the unrealized potential of their current supply
chain infrastructure. The announcement was made at Integration
World 2005, which is webMethods' annual user conference being held
this week in Atlanta for members of the company's 1,300 enterprise
customer base. Building upon the proven performance of webMethods
Fabric(TM), the company's flagship solution for process-based,
service-oriented, total business integration, the webMethods for
the Demand Driven Enterprise solutions help enterprises bridge the
gaps that exist within their current supply chains that prevent
them from responding most effectively to changes in demand. These
solutions are also the industry's first for the demand driven
enterprise to deliver the added agility and adaptability enabled by
a comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) along with the
increased predictability and responsiveness offered by webMethods'
patent-pending business activity monitoring (BAM) technologies.
This allows enterprises to more readily anticipate and more quickly
fulfill customer requirements while significantly enhancing such
processes as order-to-cash and order-to-book. Initial webMethods
for the Demand Driven Enterprise solutions will target specific
business requirements around demand fulfillment and Sales &
Operations Planning (S&OP). "Demand driven enterprises are
those that closely monitor shifts in demand with this insight being
transformed into action as quickly as these opportunities are
uncovered," said David Mitchell, president and CEO, webMethods,
Inc. "However, the highly fragmented nature of their supply chains,
which often creates a series of operational disconnects throughout
the enterprise, makes it impossible for most organizations to
achieve this objective. By leveraging our unmatched heritage,
experience and leadership in both B2B and enterprise application
integration, webMethods is able to offer a standards-based approach
for bringing the people, processes and systems of supply chain
planning and execution together within a single network. With
real-time access to demand triggers and end-to-end process
visibility, enterprises can better predict and more effectively
counter changes in demand." Each of these new solutions employs
webMethods' industry-leading business integration and process
automation platform to provide enterprises with the ability to
fully integrate and unify their end-to-end supply/demand chains. At
the same time, webMethods' BAM capabilities offer businesses
real-time process visibility spanning all of these operations with
performance metrics correlated to a variety of user-defined Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) and automated alerts proactively
issued to notify users of unanticipated changes in demand.
Predefined business processes, embedded industry rules and
role-based planning templates and user interfaces are used to
capture and deliver the industry best practices needed to better
orchestrate, synchronize and optimize an enterprise's planning and
fulfillment resources to help ensure a more profitable response to
any change in demand. webMethods Demand Fulfillment Monitoring The
webMethods Demand Fulfillment Monitoring solution helps
manufacturers significantly enhance one of their most critical
metrics, which is their "perfect order" score, by helping them to
more effectively and consistently match supply with demand
throughout their operations. This is achieved by continually
synchronizing various internal and external systems and processes
used throughout these operations to further minimize operational
latency and improve data accuracy while simultaneously working to
extend real-time, end-to-end process monitoring across all of these
supply and demand chain processes. According to Tony Friscia,
president and CEO of AMR Research [Innovative IT and The New
Economy (Sept. 27, 2005)], "The ability to use technology to manage
demand better than competitors, mastering what AMR Research calls
Demand-Driven Supply Networks (DDSNs), is another differentiator.
For example, our benchmarking studies in the Consumer Products
industry show that companies that are best at demand forecasting
average 15 percent less inventory, 17 percent stronger perfect
order fulfillment and 35 percent shorter cash-to-cash cycle times.
These leaders dwarf their competitors in earnings per share." With
this enhanced ability to readily adjust execution parameters in
response to real-time market insight, enterprises are better
equipped to ensure that the appropriate levels of the right
inventory are continually available at the right place to meet
customer needs. As a result, enterprises can speed inventory turns,
better comply with customer service level agreements (SLA) and
minimize safety-stock requirements. Already, a global manufacturer
is using this approach to eliminate exception orders, which has
resulted in a 75 percent improvement in on-time fulfillment rates
with a reduction of similar magnitude being recorded in the number
of manually processed orders as well. Key components of webMethods
Demand Fulfillment Monitoring include: * A robust and proven
integration platform enabling real-time synchronization of
disparate systems with a standards-based approach employed to
simplify and speed the inclusion of third-party trading partners
within a common supply chain framework. By linking together
existing demand fulfillment processes, enterprises can create
unified and up-to-date views of real-time inventory, customer
orders, production status and shipment dates across various systems
while also capturing critical information associated with key
business events as they occur. * A rich set of business process
management tools that enterprises can use to model, deploy and
automate key processes spanning multiple systems, data stores,
workflows and users. In addition to addressing reoccurring
requirements like order-to-cash, procure-to-pay and return process
exceptions with greater speed and consistency, enterprises can use
these tools to secure greater visibility over their operations and
to enhance collaboration and coordination around fulfillment by
automatically communicating deviations in plan before they impact
the business. * An executive dashboard accessing embedded BAM
capabilities to deliver enhanced command and control over demand
fulfillment operations. Enterprises can use these capabilities to
automatically detect and resolve conflicts, to proactively alert
users to potential exceptions based upon past occurrences and to
diagnosis and resolve systemic challenges. webMethods S&OP
Monitoring A key component of helping retailers and manufacturers
better predict and more quickly respond to changes in demand is the
webMethods S&OP Monitoring solution, which provides supply
chain executives with a consolidated, real- time view into their
sales and operational planning environment. By improving data
visibility across their operations and with trading partners,
consolidating demand signals company-wide and linking together
S&OP processes, enterprises can secure the level of
collaboration needed to more quickly detect changes in demand and
respond accordingly. This approach can be critical in getting new
products to market faster and reacting to unexpected changes as it
provides the means for orchestrating and aligning the various
resources needed across sales & marketing and production &
manufacturing. Key components of webMethods S&OP Monitoring
include: * The integration components of webMethods Fabric,
including webMethods PIM (Product Information Management) as a
centralized source for trusted product data, enable the real-time
aggregation of demand signals, product, forecast and inventory data
between critical systems. This ensures that real-time views of
point-of-sale and promotional information are available across the
company, while synchronization with trading partners via the Global
Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) provides external suppliers
with the quality data and demand insight that they require. * A
business process management component that streamlines S&OP
processes and new product introductions by automating the two-way
flow of demand requirements and product availability information. A
key feature is an automated, step-by-step event management process
that users can employ to invoke the optimal response to a variety
of scenarios, such as delays in product, component or order
availability or out-of-stock/over-supply situations. As a result,
they can more readily resolve the bottlenecks and disruption that
often negatively impact customer service levels and forecasting
accuracy. * Customer focused "scorecards" for monitoring the
real-time interaction between sales activity, promotions,
operational forecasts and business requirements with user-based
views helping to transform this information into actionable
insight. By continuously monitoring supply chain transactions and
inventory status for both in-house and contract manufacturing,
observed correlations with past occurrences can also be used to
proactively alert users to pending violations of SLAs in time for
appropriate action, such as replenishing or redirecting inventory,
to be taken. webMethods Demand Fulfillment Monitoring and
webMethods S&OP Monitoring are both now available with pricing
from webMethods. About webMethods, Inc. webMethods (NASDAQ:WEBM)
provides business integration software to integrate, assemble and
optimize available IT assets to drive business process
productivity. webMethods delivers an innovative, enterprise-class
business integration platform that incorporates proven integration
technology with next generation capabilities into one interoperable
set of tools that delivers a unique combination of efficiency,
agility and control. webMethods combines industry leadership with a
zealous commitment to customers to deliver tangible business value
to more than 1,300 global customers. webMethods is headquartered in
Fairfax, Va., with offices throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia
Pacific and Japan. More information about the company can be found
at http://www.webmethods.com/. The webMethods name and logo are
registered trademarks of, and webMethods Fabric is a trademark of,
webMethods, Inc. All other marks mentioned are trademarks or
service marks of their respective companies. This press release may
contain various remarks about the future expectations, plans and
prospects of webMethods that constitute forward-looking statements
for purposes of the safe harbor provisions of U.S. securities laws.
Actual results of webMethods may differ materially from those
indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of
various factors, risks and uncertainties, including those discussed
under the heading "Factors That May Affect Future Operating
Results" in the Business section of webMethods' Form 10-K for the
year ended March 31, 2005 and Form 10-Q for the three months ended
September 30, 2005 which are on file with the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission and may be accessed at http://www.sec.gov/ or
webMethods' investor relations web page at
http://www.webmethods.com/investors. DATASOURCE: webMethods, Inc.
CONTACT: John Conley, +1-703-980-8259, , or Brianna Boyle,
+1-703-460-6034, , both of webMethods Web site:
http://www.webmethods.com/
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