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HighJump Fills Top Spot

by Chris Chiappinelli, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 5:56:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

Supply chain software purveyor and 3M subsidiary HighJump Software has capped off a half-year-long search for a new president by naming Electronic Data Systems (EDS) veteran Joel Levinson to the post.

Former president Chris Heim, who held the reins for nine years, retired from the company in July of last year. In his absence, HighJump promoted chief financial officer Joe Blauert to chief operating officer. Blauert led the company during the executive search, and will remain at HighJump as COO.

In an interview with Managing Automation, both Levinson and Bauert stressed that despite the change at the helm, HighJump's strategic direction remains intact. Levinson said 2006 saw 25% growth in the company's core U.S. business and a "doubling of the international business." HighJump declined to provide specific revenue numbers, saying the policy of parent company 3M did not allow such disclosure.

Future momentum will also build off two acquisitions HighJump completed within the past year, Levinson said -- on-demand transportation management system provider Pinnacle Distribution Concepts Inc. and Global Beverage Group Inc. (GBG), which markets delivery management systems for consumer packaged goods companies tasked with direct-store delivery.

Although Levinson said he could not forecast additional acquisitions, he did allow for the possibility. "Right now the most exciting thing to me is that acquisition is part of [3M's] overall growth strategy."

As to the decision to look outside the company for a new leader, Blauert said, "There was general acknowledgement from everyone that with the rate of growth and the acquisitions in place, we wanted to make sure that we had enough depth in our management team to continue to get to the revenue levels we need to and not stumble along the way because of a lack of experience."

Levinson credited his 22-year tenure at EDS for affording him experience with both software strategies and consulting efforts. "They even own warehouses, so I got to see everything from order management to watching the product leave the facility," he said of his time at EDS.

In his most recent position, Levinson served as director of the company's Global Accounts Startup group. Before that, he was an operations director in EDS's Solutions Consulting division, where he was involved in supply chain initiatives.

That experience should help at HighJump, which has expanded into a broad array of technology segments to support its source-to-consumption vision. The company's aim is to provide supply chain applications for manufacturers that extend from materials sourcing through finished goods delivery.

"I think what is unique about us is the footprint that we identify does not have a competitor across the breadth of it," Blauert said. "The traditional WMS vendors have little or no presence in the manufacturing part of the supply chain, and the same can be true of the traditional manufacturing [systems] competitors."

Specifically, in the WMS space he listed RedPrairie and Manhattan Associates as direct rivals as well as SAP, which Blauert called a "peripheral" competitor. In MES, Blauert noted that the number of competitors were too numerous to list.

Earlier this month, HighJump released Supply Chain Advantage suite 9.0, a broad-based offering built on a Microsoft .NET foundation that represents all facets of that footprint. As part of the suite, warehouse management is enabled through HighJump Warehouse Advantage; manufacturing execution via HighJump Manufacturing Advantage; labor management by way of HighJump Labor Advantage; and transportation management through HighJump Transportation Advantage, an application HighJump inherited when it acquired Pinnacle. That product was formerly known as FreightLogic.

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