Event Summary
Glovia International whose capabilities seem to be far greater than its recognition in the global enterprise applications market (largely due to a number of ownership and name changes throughout its history) seems to have finally gotten its ducks in a row, and is now poised for a noticeable return, backed up by a resplendent and committed parent company.
In
October 2003, a leading provider of extended ERP solutions for engineer-to-order
(ETO) and high volume manufacturers, Glovia International,
announced it formed a strategic alliance with Fujitsu Software Corporation
to provide manufacturers, customers and suppliers with improved collaboration
and integration capabilities. Glovia International is headquartered in El Segundo,
California, (U.S.) and is a subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702),
a Tokyo, Japan-based leading provider of international IT and communications
solutions with consolidated revenues of $38 billion (USD) in fiscal 2003. The
strategic alliance should allow Glovia to improve its customers' ability to
collaborate with trading partners and reduce supply chain costs while enabling
Fujitsu Software Corporation to further penetrate the manufacturing industry.
Fujitsu Software Corporation, based in San Jose, California, is also a wholly
owned subsidiary of Fujitsu, and delivers one of the world's broadest lines
of application infrastructure software products, including the Interstage
Suite and NetCOBOL.
Fujitsu's
Interstage Suite provides a collaborative business integration platform that
enables companies to relatively easily share and exchange information across
disparate systemswhether internal or external. Coupled with Glovia International's
extended-ERP suite, glovia.com, the joint Fujitsu solution
should enable manufacturers to improve supply chain visibility, increase responsiveness,
and reduce costs. Fujitsu's Interstage Suite is one of the world's broadest
families of application infrastructure software products for designing, developing,
and managing scalable, customized mission-critical applications. The application
suite is used by more than 8,000 companies in over 83,000 installations worldwide.
As an example, Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe, a leading
supplier of high performance telecommunications services and products, has successfully
implemented the joint Fujitsu Software Corporation/Glovia International solution
to streamline trading relationships with its suppliers and customers and to
reduce costs.
Under the terms of the agreement, Glovia International will embed some of the following elements of Fujitsu's Interstage Suite into its extended-ERP solution, glovia.com, including:
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Interstage Integration Manager is the conductor for business-critical
systems, controlling and consolidating business transactions and data both
inside and outside the organizationvia its systems-centric integration capabilities.
Providing a server, adapter kit, and a suite of more than 200 adapters, the
product is based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and supports web services.
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Interstage Portal lets enterprises integrate a variety of
disparate systems and services, thereby presenting users, employees, customers,
and partners with one streamlined, consistent visual interface. It provides
highly personalized, relevant and timely content, collaborative workspaces,
and role-based tasks tied directly to business processes.
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Interstage Application Server is the foundation of supposedly
secure, reliable and effective internet and intranet applications. It provides
fully compliant Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application-hosting capabilities,
as well as all the necessary low-level services, fail-over protection, clustering,
and other J2EE features for building applications and packaged solutions.
In
July, Glovia announced the establishment of the Glovia Innovation Center,
which should enable Glovia to share its deep manufacturing expertise and astute
extended-ERP solutions more effectively with customers, prospects, and partners.
The primary mission of the center has been to educate customers and prospects
about the latest advanced solution components of the company's suite--including
supply chain management (SCM), collaboration and integration, and business intelligence
(BI)--and demonstrate how to use them to increase return on investment (ROI)
and deliver a competitive advantage. The Glovia Innovation Center should establish
a central knowledge base within Glovia and work directly with the company's
sales and professional services teams to disseminate this information.
By increasing the awareness of Glovia's technology and extended-ERP solution components, the center aims at enabling customers to leverage their existing investment in glovia.com more powerfully, and at enabling Glovia to show prospects the comprehensive capabilities of the company's extended ERP suite. To that end, the Glovia Innovation Center has already successfully helped several manufacturers to implement advanced solutions for web procurement and collaboration, including Fujitsu Shared Services Division and Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe.
This
is Part One of a four-part note.
Part
Two will detail Fujitsu's support of Glovia.
Part
Three will discuss the market impact. Part Four will cover challenges and make
user recommendations.
Enhancements to Its Extended ERP Suite
The above moves came immediately after the latest version of the company's extended-ERP suite, which was announced in May. The culmination of two years of development effort and customer input, glovia.com 7 represents a substantial increase in Glovia's ability to support the business needs of manufacturers with global operations and complex business structures. The vendor claims its new solution will enable companies to improve their supply chain performance by centralizing demand and supply management while decentralizing production optimization. glovia.com 7 also includes a powerful collaboration and integration platform, more than 60 enhancements to its core ERP functionality and integrates several existing web-based applications.
Possibly the most notable new functionality is the one that aims at improving the performance of complex supply chains containing multiple products, production facilities and business entities that span multiple countries or regions. The solution aggregates enterprise-wide demand and intelligently allocates it to production facilities based on strategic business goals, such as cost reduction or customer service, while allowing for the local optimization of production. To that end, glovia.com enhanced SCM capabilities include new solutions for demand, supply and order fulfillment management.
Glovia's
new demand management solution should enable manufacturers
to create a comprehensive, enterprise-wide view of total demand by aggregating
forecast and customer order data from sales, marketing, channels and customers.
It supposedly provides demand planners with views of total item demand and demand
allocation, the ability to make forecast adjustments, and drill down to detailed
information. With Glovia's new demand management solution, manufacturers should
be able to increase the accuracy and reliability of their demand forecasts,
improve on-time delivery performance, decrease excess inventory levels and stock
outs, reduce costs, and minimize the disruption demand changes have on their
operations. Designed specifically for companies with multiple product lines
and multiple production facilities, Glovia's demand management solution also
incorporates real-time capable-to-promise (CTP) functionality, allowing manufacturers
to accurately commit to customer orders and forecasts.
Glovia's
supply management solution places global demand in
the correct local production facility based on available capacity and inventory
levels, while simultaneously considering factors like cost or customer delivery
date. The solution enables production planners to optimize their distributed
operations to meet demand and allows them to review and adjust how the allocation
of orders to production facilities. The new supply management solution aims
at providing manufacturers with the flexibility they need to meet changing customer
demand while minimizing the impact these changes have on the plant floor.
glovia.com
also includes functionality for managing the entire order fulfillment
business process, enabling manufacturers to synchronize orders with planned
production. Using a memory-resident, constraint-based optimization engine, Glovia's
solution determines the best possible supply scenario for given demand. The
planning engine takes into account global resources and commitments, including
capacity, inventory, orders, critical resources as well as cross-plant and plant-to-customer
lead times. The order fulfillment solution includes real-time available-to-promise
(ATP) functionality as well as sophisticated business rules that allow manufacturers
to instantly offer alternative configurations and substitutions to meet customer
delivery dates.
glovia.com
7 also provides manufacturers with a collaborative business integration platform
to support their mission-critical operations. As already mentioned, the new
platform is built using Fujitsu's collaborative business integration solution,
Interstage. The solution includes inbound and outbound XML transaction sets,
XML data synchronization capabilities, and functionality for trading partner
management, workflow and transaction automation. It also supports the latest
technology standards, including J2EE, SOAP, UDDI, ebXML and CORBA as well as
industry standards such as RosettaNet.
In
addition to the new global SCM functionality, collaboration and integration
platform, glovia.com 7 also includes more than 60 individual functionality enhancements
to its core ERP applications. The new solution improves the company's customer
relationship management (CRM), procurement, manufacturing, financials, and projects
applications. Last but not least, the latest version of glovia.com should simplify
Glovia's overall solution offering by incorporating the company's existing collaborative
commerce solutions--glovia.e, glovia.ec and
glovia.hub--into its single glovia.com product suite. The fully
integrated solution should provide manufacturers with web-enabled functionality
for product configuration, sales and service orders, and customer self-service.
Since introducing these e-business applications in 2000, Glovia has worked to
seamlessly incorporate them into glovia.com, which should also mitigate any
brand and product positioning confusion issues of the past (see Will
Glovia Glow Again Through Its Hub And VARs?).
This concludes Part One of a four-part note.
Part
Two will detail Fujitsu's support of Glovia.
Part
Three will discuss the market impact.
Part
Four will cover challenges and make user recommendations.