products value for IT

Real Time Supply Chain Transforms Supply Chain Management

Many manufacturers are investing in real time supply chain initiatives to drive transformations in their supply chain management (SCM) practices. Traditional demand planning and supply chain planning no longer fully addresses today's reality. Supply chain management success today is defined by the speed and effectiveness of responding to constant and unforeseen changes. The demanding requirements where real world variances in demand, supply and product occur don't require more reports or queries, but rapid decisions and action—a real time supply chain. Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ provides access to real time information and facilitates multi-enterprise collaboration amongst front-line decision makers. Diverse action teams across the supply chain are able to reach optimal decisions that align with corporate objectives and rapidly drive effective action inside the sales and operations planning (S&OP) horizon.

Delivering Superior Operations Performance with Less Complexity

As an on-demand service, RapidResponse can be deployed and operational in weeks, reducing the burden on IT by empowering supply chain management professionals to solve their own problems without the need for multiple "one-off" custom solutions or costly traditional demand planning and supply chain planning systems. RapidResponse delivers more IT value with less complexity:

• Lower total cost of ownership and no capital investment—an on-demand service requires no user-owned or managed infrastructure, reducing risks and costs by eliminating the need for up-front capital investments and ongoing IT resources for maintenance and management.
• Low deployment costs—proven methodology for completing a new deployment within weeks supported by tools to ease the integration and deployment process minimizing the impact on IT resources.
• Response Management capabilities from a single service—RapidResponse empowers supply chain management staff to solve many of today's most challenging supply chain problems with a single decision-making tool that facilitates response to changes in demand, supply, product and daily operations.
• Meet users' unique Response Management needs—RapidResponse is being used by demand managers, planners, buyers, supply chain managers, executives, customer service representatives, financial analysts, material managers and many others to solve problems on their own—without the need for ongoing IT staff support and involvement.
• Leverage all corporate data, including SAP, ORACLE ERP, and SCM systems—RapidResponse leverages the information directly from existing sources and consolidates your heterogeneous data into a single version of the truth to facilitate rapid response to ever changing conditions.

RapidResponse employs universal intuitive user interfaces, an essential requirement for diverse, ad hoc supply chain management action teams that often span the enterprise and beyond to suppliers and partners. RapidResponse leverages the familiar Web browser, spreadsheets, and scorecards. Behind the scenes, RapidResponse is continuously acquiring current information from different operational systems, executing sophisticated and powerful manufacturing analytics and synchronizing a single version of the truth across the distributed action team to empower them with a real time supply chain. RapidResponse is enabling tens of thousands of employees at companies such as Casio, Jabil Circuit, Research in Motion (RIM) and Solectron (now Flextronics) to rapidly respond to supply chain problems and drive breakthrough operations performance.

Learn more about the benefits of accessing Response Management capabilities via an on-demand service.