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Many companies face inefficiencies due to system, process, and organizational barriers between their material planning and procurement functions, which can lead to high inventory and transaction costs. In addition, many businesses have manual processes to convert material or procurement plans to purchase orders or contracts—as well as manual processes to manage expedite/de-expedite functions and order cancellations. This lack of automation often leads to slow response times and low productivity.
The i2 Solution: i2 Collaborative Material Management
i2 Collaborative Material Management, part of the i2 Collaborative Supply Execution suite, is designed to help improve material procurement decisions.
The solution can help companies synchronize and automate the material planning and procurement processes to react much faster to changes in demand through rapid “what-if” scenarios and incremental planning. The solution offers proactive visibility into the impact of supply changes on demand and vice versa.
In addition, purchase orders and requisitions can be automatically processed from material requirement plans based on business rules. The solution can be connected with supply planning solutions to automatically execute on recommended schedules—synchronizing planning recommendations with actual execution.
Capabilities of i2 Collaborative Material Management can include:
- Automated release of expedite, de-expedite, and cancel communication to suppliers from planning
- Trade-off analysis to assess impact of supply changes to customer orders
- Identification of impact of demand changes on component supply
Benefits of i2 Collaborative Material Management can include:
- Reduced costs through proactive visibility into supply changes on demand and vice versa
- Reduced inventory due to lower safety stocks
- Improved productivity through automated processing of material requirement plans to create purchase orders and requisitions depending on business rules
- Improved management of exceptions of expedites, de-expedites, and cancellations
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