Companies from across the high tech, manufacturing, retail and consumer products industries were recently named finalists for the Ken Sharma Award of Excellence.
Co-sponsored by i2 and the i2 User Group, the annual award, which honors i2's late co-founder Ken Sharma, was open to hundreds of i2 users. An independent panel of analysts from AMR Research judged each nominee in the categories of innovation, return on investment, and depth and breadth. Global winners will be named from the list of finalists in the second half of 2009.
Innovation finalists
Fairchild Semiconductor is a global leader in delivering energy-efficient power analog and power discrete solutions for consumer, communications, industrial, mobile, computing and automotive systems. Fairchild's overall business driver was to achieve "Perfect Order Delivery Performance." With i2 solutions implemented across the entire Fairchild supply chain for all plants and divisions, the semiconductor company estimates a $20 million savings during the next four years based on published industry research. Fairchild has also improved its "Perfect Order" rate by a full two percentage points.
Whirlpool Corporation is the world's leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances. Whirlpool sought to improve forecast errors to enable inventory reductions and service-level improvements and to streamline and document forecasting processes that drive improved communications and sales and operations planning efforts. With i2 solutions in place, Whirlpool achieved a year-to-date forecast error reduction of more than 30 percent at both SKU level and SKU/location level.
Woolworths is a leading South African retailer offering a selected range of clothing, footwear, toiletries, cosmetics, homeware, food and financial services. With a need to conduct integrated assortment planning to support change in its supply chain strategy, and to upgrade to supported software versions, Woolworths implemented i2 retail solutions. These implementations are expected to deliver significant increases in profits due to improved sales and cost savings.
Depth and breadth finalists
One of the world's fastest growing global steel companies, Essar Steel NV has tripled its capacity in the last two years and plans to become one of the top 10 global steel producers by 2015. Essar Steel sought to increase profitability, strengthen customer relationships, reduce inventories and increase throughput. Since implementing a variety of i2 solutions to address advanced order planning and sales and operations planning, Essar Steel has increased forecast accuracy for domestic contract customers by nearly 30 percent. The company has reduced work-in-process inventory and order leads times, in addition to reducing response time for customer inquiries from 2-3 hours to 6 seconds.
Lenovo develops, manufactures and markets high-quality, secure and easy-to-use technology products and services worldwide and dedicates itself to building the world's most innovative personal computers. The company sought to improve serviceability, end-to-end supply chain cost, cash-conversion cycles and quality. Lenovo has reduced its end-to-end order fulfillment cycle by running i2 Factory Planner many times a day. By using the i2 platform, Lenovo can now better leverage supply chain information for enhanced and faster analysis.
Maxim Integrated Products is a worldwide leader in the design, development and manufacture of the analog, mixed-signal, high-frequency and digital circuits. Through its implementation of i2 solutions, Maxim has achieved significant improvements to its supply chain management processes. The company has synchronized planning, improved on-time delivery to customers, increased the efficiency of factory execution, increased the speed of its planning cycle, and improved data management.
Return on investment finalists
Incitec Pivot Ltd (IPL) is Australia's largest fertilizer manufacturer and distributor of a full range of inorganic fertilizer products. The primary driver of IPL's initial implementation of i2 solutions was to generate a cohesive, constrained plan for the company's supply chain. Since implementing several i2 solutions as part of an overall planning redesign, IPL has reduced monthly planning cycles by 4-5 days. Weekly planning cycles used to take 1-2 days, but now multiple runs can be completed within a day. The number of errors, constraint violations and shorted demands in the final plan has been reduced significantly. Implementation of the total project has contributed to IPL reducing year-end inventory levels in excess of US$28million and reducing year-to-date land freight cost by US$1.4 million.
Kimberly-Clark, a leading global health and hygiene company, sought to implement a new transportation management system (TMS) along with a business process redesign to reduce its transportation spend. By implementing several i2 TMS solutions, and by leveraging optimization capabilities to achieve rate reductions prior to implementation, Kimberly-Clark had achieved US$8.77 million in savings in North America at the time of its Ken Sharma Award application. During that same time frame, the company also saved US$1.6 million from its implementation in Europe.
Serving both consumers and original equipment manufacturers, SanDisk Corporation designs, develops, manufactures and markets flash storage card products for a wide variety of electronic systems and digital devices. SanDisk wanted to create a supply chain capability that it could use as a competitive differentiator to continue its market leadership, and to maintain profitable growth with a strong balance sheet. Since implementing i2 solutions, SanDisk has either maintained or improved its customer service levels as its unit volumes, customer base and product portfolio have dramatically increased. SanDisk has also strengthened its sales and operations management processes, and has reduced its planning cycle from about six weeks to one week.
