Amitive, which spun out in 2006 after operating captively within Mitsui since the early 2000s, offers “community supply chain management” for companies that outsource all or part of their manufacturing.
Today’s companies, Amitive President and CEO Amar Singh says, need collaborative software to manage finished or partially finished goods across many factories and geographies in real time. While traditional supply chain software is designed to optimize factory resources, such as machines, labor, and raw materials, and then to work outward to warehouses, suppliers, and customers, Amitive Unity helps users manage what Singh calls “product velocity: How fast can I move my goods? How much do I buy? How do I ship?”
To achieve this “outside-in approach,” Amitive built flexible demand-supply synchronization and demand planning capabilities into its software, offered in a software-as-a-service model. The company has patents pending on a new architecture that is designed without a pre-defined data structure or optimization constraints, such as labor or machinery. “We call it a customer-process architecture,” Singh says. Amitive configures the data structure to match a customer’s business processes, rather than imposing hard-wired data fields on customers, a solution that often require new processes.
Amitive’s potential customer universe is about as broad as you can get: “almost any company producing goods in some shape or form — discrete or continuous, it doesn’t matter, if it’s tying up inventory and outsourcing production,” Singh says.