GT Nexus and Kinaxis Launch Strategic Partnership

Oakland, CA, USA and Ottawa, Canada, April 30, 2012 – GT Nexus and Kinaxis today announced a strategic partnership to deliver the industry’s only cloud-based unified planning and execution platform for enterprise customers and business process outsourcing (BPO) service providers.

“One of the biggest challenges companies face today is responding quickly to market changes and risk while simultaneously managing cost as their supply chain becomes more global, more distributed, and more complex,” said Aaron Sasson, CEO of GT Nexus. “The new world of business networks demands tightly integrated supply chain planning and execution.”

While companies have invested heavily in enterprise software and B2B messaging “middleware” solutions to help them optimize inventory and fulfillment strategies, the vision of a fully integrated and responsive supply chain network has remained unfulfilled.

This is because of the enormous information barrier that companies face when trying to make smart planning decisions in the context of highly dynamic and complex global supply chain structures.

“Traditional enterprise planning systems are starved of deep and detailed execution data from third parties – such as inventory positions, lead times, lead time variability, ETAs, and accumulating product cost – that is needed to optimize operations,” said Doug Colbeth, CEO and Chairman of Kinaxis. “It’s like having a brain without a nervous system. You can’t unify planning and execution unless you can get beyond the boundaries of the single enterprise with a system designed to optimize both the flow of information and analysis of data across the entire multi-tier value chain.”

Getting beyond the single enterprise is critical because so much of the data required to make smart supply chain decisions resides with external partners, not within a company’s own internal systems. Aberdeen Research estimates that up to 85% of the data a company needs to gain control over its multi-partner, multi-tier supply chain relies on frequent data sharing among partners in the chain.

To break through, a radically different approach is required. Cloud infrastructure designed specifically for multi-enterprise supply chain management and collaboration is the key enabler. This is not the domain of ERP providers.

The partnership between GT Nexus and Kinaxis combines the best of both companies – the planning and simulation “brains” of the Kinaxis platform with the inter-enterprise execution network of GT Nexus.

Kinaxis provides a single product that powers the underlying capabilities essential to balancing demand and supply across an enterprise. RapidResponse® Control Tower offers a standard foundation on which many strategic business applications — such as supply chain planning, demand management, S&OP, supplier collaboration — can be deployed.

GT Nexus provides real-time visibility into orders, inventory, shipments and commerce transactions from order point to final delivery and payment. Using advanced agent technology and business analytics to monitor supply chain execution flow, companies and their partners collaborate as business networks to reduce costs and improve performance across their entire value chains.

“This is a terrific match of capabilities and an ideal deployment model for companies with global, complex supply chain networks,” said Sasson.

Added Colbeth: “Cloud is no longer just about great IT economics. It’s about new information models for network-wide collaboration and information sharing. In the cloud, it’s finally possible to merge smart planning with hyper-responsive execution.”

The companies aim to support both enterprise customers seeking control tower solutions, as well as BPO practices that require an “on demand” IT infrastructure to quickly deploy and manage integrated planning and execution processes for their largest, most strategic customers.

About GT Nexus

GT Nexus offers a cloud-based platform that the world's biggest companies use to drive efficiency and agility across the global supply chain. Leaders in manufacturing, retail and logistics services all share GT Nexus as their standard, multi-enterprise collaboration platform. Users operate against a core set of information across multiple supply chain functions to optimize the flow of goods and trade information, from order point to final payment. Customers include Xerox, Williams-Sonoma, Nestlé, DHL, Sears, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods and The Home Depot. For information, visit www.gtnexus.com.

About Kinaxis

Kinaxis delivers a cloud-based solution at the heart of planning and response management for value chain operations. Large manufacturing companies with complex supply chain networks and volatile business environments rely on RapidResponse Control Tower for collaborative planning, continuous performance monitoring, and coordinated response to plan variances across multiple areas of the business. RapidResponse encompasses a full spectrum of supply chain related business processes, including such functions as: S&OP, supply and capacity planning, demand management, and supplier collaboration. As a result, Kinaxis customers have replaced disparate planning and performance management tools and are realizing significant operations performance breakthroughs. From a single product, customers are able to make both long-term and real-time demand and supply balancing decisions quickly, collaboratively, and in line with the shared business objectives of multiple stakeholders. For more information, visit www.kinaxis.com