i2 Releases i2 Five.Two: The Complete Platform for Dynamic Value Chain Management
Flexible, Intuitive, Powerful Solutions Designed to Help Companies Gain Efficiencies and Drive Revenue
Dallas, TX
October 25, 2001
i2 Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: ITWO) today announced via a global Webcast the general availability of i2 Five.Two, a highly scalable business platform which includes new products and enhancements to i2’s popular family of solutions and services. i2 Five.Two is designed to allow companies to quickly and dramatically improve key business metrics such as sales, inventory turns, gross and net margin, and concept-to-cash within their enterprise and across their value chain, and begin to realize the benefits of Dynamic Value Chain Management.
i2 Five.Two solutions go beyond monolithic planning and ERP systems to enable planning, visibility, collaboration and transaction management within an enterprise and across multiple companies. These solutions are modular, designed for fast implementation and easy interoperability and integration with existing technologies and systems, linking people and processes, intranets and the Internet. i2 Five.Two solutions are intended to help companies rapidly create and manage a trading partner ecosystem – a network of customers, suppliers, and partners working together in real time to ensure common success.
“In these tough economic conditions, companies demand more than a vision, they demand fast system implementation and a rapid return on their technology investments,” said Greg Brady, i2 CEO. “We’ve designed i2 Five.Two to be rolled out incrementally so that companies can tackle the critical part of the value chain that will yield them the highest ROI at the lowest risk. We act as a partner to support them throughout the process.”
“Collaborating across the value chain requires an entirely new standards-based, architectural framework that is flexible enough to bridge the gap between planning and execution, and intuitive enough to facilitate adoption by all value chain members,” said Tim Minahan, vice president, Supply Chain Research, Aberdeen Group. “i2 Five.Two is a significant upgrade to i2’s existing product suite and provides a solid foundation to manage and execute collaborative activities across the value chain.”
New Products
The i2 Five.Two core solutions include i2 Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), i2 Supply Chain Management (SCM), i2 Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and i2 Content, along with several new and enhanced products:
i2 Distributed Order Management, a new product addition to i2 CRM, is the only product on the market designed to solve the difficult problem of end-to-end order fulfillment by aggregating, managing, and brokering orders across multiple applications, divisions and enterprises.
i2 Inventory Visibility and Execution, which has been added to i2 SCM, has been developed to help companies collaborate across multiple enterprises to optimize, monitor and control all supply chain processes simultaneously, including production, inventory, distribution and transportation.
i2 Procurement, an enhanced addition to i2 SRM, is designed to assist companies manage all e-procurement transactions including requisitioning, purchase order creation and settlement. i2’s procurement solution not only provides the ability for companies to source globally, but to also procure locally, in a highly decentralized and distributed environment.
Enhanced Industry Templates
i2 Five.Two features improved pre-configured industry templates. Each template is built to address the unique needs of a specific industry including packaged role-based workflows, integration capabilities, product configurations, and example models and scenarios. From this starting point, companies can modify the templates to meet their unique needs. These templates pass on to i2 customers the best practices gained from thousands of customer implementations. Template users also benefit from i2’s deep industry expertise so that they can deploy solutions rapidly and avoid the pitfalls typically associated with a new implementation.
Redesigned User Interfaces
i2 Five.Two features a redesigned user interface created in partnership with frog design, a world-leader in progressive interface design. With a common look and feel across all solutions, i2 Five.Two interfaces have been tailored to functional roles to empower users to make decisions faster and more effectively. In a distributed business environment, where multiple suppliers or downstream customers must interact through the software, consistent user interfaces spur higher adoption and usage levels.
Technology
The i2 Platform has been enhanced to enable customers to deploy processes that span planning and execution across enterprises. Some of the key enhancements include:
Common Integration Architecture - This distributed architecture is designed to make it easy for i2 solutions to be integrated with legacy applications and ERP systems.
Common Integration Services - These standards-based services have been developed to enable enterprise and e-commerce connectivity as well as ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) to enable rapid integration of disparate systems, allowing companies to leverage existing systems.
RosettaNet Support - The only RosettaNet communication service available today has been added to i2 Five.Two so that customers can communicate quickly through RosettaNet with limited IT involvement, replacing when appropriate, older, more costly technologies such as EDI.
XML-Based Application Programming Interface (API) - i2’s API set (TMAPI) has been expanded with full XML support to simplify integration between i2 Five.Two solutions and other applications.
New and Expanded Services
i2 Five.Two incorporates new services, such as the i2 Value Chain Accelerator program, which have been developed to offer a quick, easy way to drive efficiencies beyond the boundaries of a company through improved planning and transaction efficiencies. The program includes value chain solutions for planning, collaboration, content management and supply chain execution; connectivity to buyers, suppliers and marketplaces through the TradeMatrix Open
Commerce Network; and on-boarding of trading partners to participate in these initiatives. i2 also provides tools to measure value before implementation and at each stage of the process.
About Dynamic Value Chain Management
Dynamic Value Chain Management is a business philosophy of collaborating both within a company and across companies in the value chain at the rate of business. To do so requires streamlined, decision-making workflows across companies, closing the gap between planning and execution to as close to real-time as possible. The net result is a fundamental change in the relationship between companies and their trading partners, leading to unprecedented value creation for customers and shareholders alike.
About i2
For more than a decade, i2 has been a leader in supply chain management. i2 has extended its technology and expertise to Dynamic Value Chain Management—solutions to help companies collaborate on decision-making processes not only across functions within a single company, but across multiple companies. i2 solutions span the value chain interactions, including customer relationship management, supply chain management and supplier relationship management. Established in 1988, i2 is the only software solutions provider that measures, audits, and reports total value provided to its customers, with a mission to deliver $75 billion in value by 2005. Learn more at www.i2.com.
i2 is a registered trademark of i2 Technologies, Inc. and its subsidiaries.
i2 Cautionary Language
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements regarding anticipated benefits and improvements from the implementation of i2’s software solutions. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those projected. The risks and uncertainties include the customer`s ability to implement i2 solutions successfully or to achieve benefits attributable to i2 products. For a discussion of factors which could impact i2`s financial results and cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements, please refer to i2`s recent filings with the SEC, particularly the Form 10-K/A filed August 7, 2001 and Form 10-Q filed August 14, 2001. i2 assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this news release.
Contact:
Sue LaDow, i2, 469-357-3027, susan_ladow@i2.com
Kris Hoover, Edelman Public Relations for i2, 214-443-7589, kris.hoover@edelman.com
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