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New Release Monitors Supply Chain Volatility

by Diane Himes, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 5:55:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

Aiming to mitigate some of the ever-mounting pressure on global manufacturing supply chains, operations performance management software provider Kinaxis today announced a new version of its flagship product, RapidResponse.

RapidResponse 9 gives manufacturers and fulfillment organizations visibility into supply chain events and the ability to respond to exceptions, providing decision makers with the right data at the right time, the company said.

In the new release of RapidResponse, Kinaxis highlights three debut features intended to enhance customer service and operating performance at user companies.

With RapidResponse 9, users can create and customize specific alerts, such as "notify me when any order will be more than two days late," and specify when and where to send the alert. The new Message Center provides a centralized repository for alert management, via a Web browser.

RapidResponse 9 also enables "people-centered" collaboration via RapidResponse TeamForm, which can recommend the best team member to respond to an event as it happens. In the chain of software that helps run a manufacturing business, RapidResponse sits just before a shop's execution application, Kinaxis said, so that users can adjust the execution strategy in advance, if necessary. The software can tie directly into MES systems, but requires integration to do so. As workers respond to individual events, contextual and commitment information is collected and shared with team members so that they can collaborate to solve the issue.

Finally, RapidResponse Inventory Liability Manager 9, an optional application, allows brand owners and contract manufacturers to monitor and measure liability exposure using charts and reports that help parse the impact of proposed response actions.

Kinaxis lets users test hypothetical adjustments and visualize their effect on the supply chain. For example, Kinaxis Vice President of Marketing Randy Littleson told Managing Automation, with RapidResponse, a user can enter an order change as a "what-if," and the system will provide details on the effects on the transaction in terms of the bill of materials and alignment of supply and demand at the component-part level. At that point, the user can decide whether it's advisable to move forward with the change.

"I think you can arguably say it's never been easier to lose a customer than it is today," Littleson said. Modern challenges such as global competition, changing consumer buying trends, an uptick in outsourcing, and shrinking product lifecycles have put manufacturers on the defensive as they try to cope with unexpected events throughout the supply chain.

"In environments where decisions are high in risk and complexity, many manufacturers find they need systems for collective risk trade-off and response; whether the risk takes the form of a forecast spike, a component approaching obsolescence, a sales order shortfall, or more strategic sales and operations planning (S&OP) or network commitments, discrete manufacturers increasingly place a premium on the ability to see, study, and simulate alternate resolutions before pulling the decision trigger on a major trade-off," said Supply Chain Research Director Stephen Hochman, in a recent AMR Research article titled "Response Management: Next Wave of Supply Chain Innovation?" (subscription required).

"While the concept of real-time predictive intelligence isn't new inside the four walls of manufacturing, this form of 'risk triage' may well be the next wave of supply chain innovation," the AMR report continued, since today's discrete manufacturers must manage complex, global supply networks well outside the traditional boundaries of the enterprise, including suppliers, contract manufacturers, and third-party logistics companies.

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