In order to succeed in today's electronics industry, companies must compete to provide customers with world-class, innovative products and services at low cost. The model the industry has adopted to meet this challenge is specialization. Brand owners select partners for design, technology, manufacturing, logistics, service, and channel management. Multiple participants now share responsibility for critical processes that cannot adequately be managed at arm's length. Competitive advantage is created or lost in this distributed supply chain.

In this competitive supply chain environment, companies must manage customer demands for new supply chain programs while developing new business models of their own. These new supply chain models require coordination capabilities that are not supported by existing systems rigidly tied to traditional business models.

Existing systems, originally deployed to manage internal operations, were not designed to manage processes in the extended enterprise where effective multi-party collaboration is critical to success.

Customer demands must be met in an environment where margins are razor thin and keeping costs and risk under control is not easy. In addition, heterogeneous IT capabilities among supply chain partners make the requisite level of communications difficult to establish.

The i2 Solution: i2 Multi-Enterprise Interactive

i2 Multi-Enterprise Interactive provides the means to synchronize operations across multiple tiers of the supply chain to reduce cost, reduce risk, and enhance compliance. Just as an ERP system integrates departments and processes within an enterprise, Multi-Enterprise Interactive is designed to integrate the companies and business processes that constitute the multi-enterprise supply chain.

Multi-Enterprise Interactive offers a solution to create a multi-tier supply chain control system for companies to manage innovative as well as traditional supply chain models. This solution provides companies with the means to connect, coordinate, and monitor activities across both single enterprise and multi-enterprise supply chains.

At the heart of the MEI control system is the “program” concept. A program includes the trading partners that build and deliver a particular product, along with the commitments they establish, the roles they play, the processes and workflow they adopt, and the metrics by which they measure their success. As a company progressively deploys more programs, supporting more products and including more trading partners, they become the fabric of the multi-enterprise control system and a new lever for competitive success.

Capabilities of i2 Multi-Enterprise Interactive include:

• Ability to achieve one version of the truth for an at a glance understanding and faster action across the multi-enterprise supply chain
• Dynamic, real-world views of multi-tiered operations and workflows with timely data
• Identify and resolve demand-supply imbalances
• Monitor and control multi-tier liability
• Manage diverse fulfillment programs with multiple third parties
• Replenish channel partner inventory globally
• Coordinate outsourced returns and service processes
• Deliver multi-tier visibility to compliance information, automating the material declaration (MD) process, and streamlining compliance analysis for RoHS and WEEE.
• Automate procurement to streamline the order-change process
• Execute best practice global vendor-managed inventory programs
• Deliver a web-based UI to make information available anywhere at anytime to both the supply and customer base
• Establish architectural framework for executing lean principles in an outsourced supply chain network

Benefits of i2 Multi-Enterprise Interactive can include:

• Increased revenue through implementation of new business models
• 40-60% reduction in excess inventory across the supply chain
• 5-10% reduction in overall supply chain inventory
• Increase in new business as a result of expanded service offering
• Significant improvements in customer service levels
• 10-20% increase in productivity