A myriad of challenges face businesses today as they strive to create plans that facilitate speed and flexibility in an often-fragmented global environment. Successful planning requires compliance management to integrate disparate plans and ensure corporate accountability. Companies need global plan visibility and control to enable rapid responses to changes and to provide a real-time virtual plan across functional boundaries and time horizons.
Organizational alignment is critical to understanding the interrelationships of metrics at different business levels and to synchronize the execution of plans across functions and time. Companies must react to supply chain problems, evaluate alternatives, and make effective decisions at the speed of business change, as well as enable resolution action consistency and drive continuous improvement across the organization. All of these functions must be supported by an infrastructure that facilitates fast and effective decision-making while leveraging existing investments in systems and processes.
"Sales and operation planning lies at the center of this suite of applications and it drives the value of our other applications. Now we’re in a very good position because we’re getting the same revenue with considerably less inventory. Real cash has been given back to the business by freeing up millions in working capital from inventories."
-- Mark Carvalho, Program Manager, Supply Chain Operations, ADTRAN
Increase revenues and assets while reducing expenses
Plan Management from i2 enables companies to boost customer service levels due to increased product availability and improved responsiveness. Cash-to-cash cycles are lowered with synchronized planning and execution. Better decision-making with i2 Plan Management leads to reduced expediting costs and operating expenses. As planner productivity increases, companies reduce costs for system changes and upgrades, as well as improve the return on investment from information technology assets.
Sales and Operations Management
Sales and Operations Management enables continued, cross-functional synchronization across different organizational entities to establish a single plan for “one version of the truth” that eliminates silos. Companies can proactively detect problems and respond appropriately through root-cause analysis and consistent resolution using process playbooks. Plan Management allows for the rapid evaluation of multiple plan scenarios, driving profitable decisions related to the balance of demand and supply.
An overlay Sales and Operations Management solution enables plan synchronization, corporate plan accountability, and rapid financial impact analysis of multiple plan scenarios. The detailed planning workflows for Sales and Operations Management are enabled by i2 Demand Management and i2 Planning solutions that generate optimized demand and supply plans for the enterprise.
Allocation and Promise Management
Providing increased visibility into current and planned supply, Allocation and Promise Management enables companies to achieve higher fill rates and make more accurate and reliable customer commitments. Preferential service can be provided based on customer priority, with order and seller channel differentiation. Companies can deliver fast global order promising based on availability, and increase profits by allocating supply intelligently.
Software as a Service
i2’s Fabless Planning on Demand is fully hosted and managed with preconfigured fabless semiconductor algorithms for fast provisioning of Advanced Planning Software as a Service.
For growing fabless companies, i2 offers sophisticated Demand and Supply Planning software as a service, leveraging our industry leading solutions in a hosted, low-cost subscription environment. This offering enables you to rapidly automate and optimize supply chain planning through a low-impact transition.
As the number one computer systems company in the world and an innovator in Web-based sales operations, Dell Computer Corporation was already setting the standards for customer service, sales, and distribution in its industry. But, recognizing that it would need a scalable value chain management initiative to keep up with its enormous growth, Dell implemented i2 solutions, and has lowered costs, increased employee productivity, and reduced product time to market.
i2 Software as a Service 
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