Amitive Unity enables customer and supplier forecast management across the supply chain community.

Customer Forecasts
Amitive puts an end to the fragmented and laborious management-by-spreadsheet (and phone, fax, and email!) customer forecast model typically employed in supply chain management today. By moving collaboration online, onto a single system, Amitive streamlines forecast management, reduces information latency and errors, and eliminates the need for so many people to be involved in the collection, scrubbing, and distribution process. Amitive enables customers to submit their forecasts to the supply chain owner electronically via electronic automated messages (e.g. EDI, RosettaNet, etc.), manually via the Community Console, and via uploads in a variety of file types (e.g. CSV files).

Amitive gathers the individual customer forecasts and aggregates them, by product, in a single repository. A consolidated forecast view provides a better overall picture to the demand side.

The old saying is that “forecasts are wrong and they change”. Brand owners rarely use a customer forecast as-is, so Amitive enables forecast scrubbing. And providing the ability for the owner to make changes at a consolidated level provides less variability and a more accurate forecast. From here, the Brand Owner can do more detailed demand planning with their solution of choice.

Amitive provides the ability to review and compare various forecasts to actual and even to one-another. This enables the community owner the visibility to the changes a customer is making over a time horizon.

Supplier Forecasts
Using Amitive’s Planning Engine can also provide your suppliers with more visibility into the future. Taking in the customer forecasts and netting them against supply, the Owner can determine a more accurate time-phased plan on what the future requirements are. Sharing these anticipated requirements with the supplier, and collaborating to fine tune them, will not only open up the communication chann el, but will also allow the supplier to be more flexible and thereby better able to support your ever changing requirements. These supplier forecasts can be shared within the Supplier’s console, electronically and can be grouped by product hierarchy, item number, or other such groupings that meet your business needs.

 

Sales Order Management
With a multitude of systems and formats in play in a community, most brand owners resort to siloed sales force automation, manually managed paper, and/or email order management with subsequent rekeying/uploading into an ERP system of record. The result is again an error-prone, labor intensive process that is rigid to change and provides limited visibility to stakeholders. Why spend all that time and effort on these non-value-adding activities? There’s a better way.

Amitive streamlines order management by automating the end-to-end process on a single system and centralizes information in a single system of record. Amitive is flexible. Should the owner choose to make their existing CRM/ERP application the order management system of record, Amitive shares that information seamlessly.

Pricing Catalogue
Amitive provides a user defined item pricing catalog capable of managing many complex and custom pricing schemes including:
• Volume pricing
• Customer-specific pricing
• Contract pricing (including blanket orders with release orders)
• Cost-plus pricing (fixed dollar, margin, etc)
Amitive supports user-defined multi-currency pricing for order management around the globe.

ATP/CTP – Availability & Promising
With real-time, cross-community inventory visibility, Amitive supports confident order promising with automated available to promise (ATP) and capable to promise (CTP) management. Now promises made will be promises kept thus driving ever-higher customer service levels.

One of the keys enabling intelligent ATP/CTP is built-in customer preference and rankings tools. These give the brand owner the ability to prioritize service levels by rank value of customers. For example, you can re-allocate inventory in short supply based on customer ranking. This allows you to move inventory to your key customers and prevent others from ‘stealing’ product in tight supply. With permission based access, Customer Service and Sales people can make promises and commitments based on preferential logic.

Customer Collaboration
Meeting customer requirements is paramount for the brand owner. Amitive helps drive brand owners’ requirement for ever-higher customer service levels by empowering customers with online collaboration capabilities. Sales Order collaboration follows a process similar to Purchase Order collaboration with suppliers where users go from phone, fax, and email collaboration to real-time, online collaboration on Amitive.

Amitive minimizes constraints and drives community optimization by enabling collaboration for all documents. Workflow and signature level documentation are defined and automated for each collaborative function. Amitive collaboration enables participants to review documents, identify lines to be collaborated or rejected, and enables users to input free-form notes to complement the identified reason. So now there’s a more complete record of alternatives considered, parties involved, decisions made—whatever’s important for future reference.

The Collaboration portlet provides an overview of the status of each document. You can see the portion of the document in the sales order process from both the buyer’s and the seller’s point of view. Ensuring progress, you can identify if lines get “hung up” and address those exceptions to keep the process moving forward. Ready access allows users to quickly understand where the various orders and lines are within the collaboration process; and with Amitive’s ability to illustrate where bottlenecks are, users can get out of firefighting mode and take proactive action to correct course and avoid missing commitments.

Sales Order Collaboration: From the Customer’s Perspective

Sales Order Collaboration: From the Brand Owner’s Perspective

Cross-Community Order Visibility
The most frequent question asked by customers is “WISMO?” Where’s my order? From here it is a time honored tradition to transfer these inquiries among individuals and across departments, and usually promise a call back once an answer is prepared. Amitive provides order visibility across the community and supports first call inquiry resolution for that most frequent of questions. You can even empower customers with access to the order system enabling self-service inquiry management by the customers 24 x 7 anywhere they have access to a browser. These tools allow the Brand Owner to quickly, efficiently, and accurately advise customers not only where their order is, but when they can expect it. As exceptions occur, Amitive supports proactive advice to customers so they can plan their business accordingly; thus building more interactive communication and trust.

 

One of the biggest contributors to excess inventory in the supply chain is lack of true inventory visibility. Inventory data is typically managed in silos by the owner, customers and suppliers. Cross-community visibility is incomplete, typically only sharing finished goods that are in stock; maybe in transit. Complicating management further, community inventory visibility is typically managed in batch runs that are out of date with the first transactions of the day. The panacea used to deal with uncertainty from lack of visibility and management tools is the application of the universal band-aid of high safety stock. Amitive is out to eliminate excess inventory that used to offset the limitations of today’s supply chain management tools.

The Holy Grail of Inventory Management: Real-time, Consolidated Visibility
Amitive brings the supply chain community the holy grail of inventory management: a real-time, hierarchical, consolidated view of inventory from the customer to the owner through suppliers—and in between (in-transit). Amitive gives you community inventory by quantity and valuation, on hand, on hold and in transit (both inbound and outbound). Amitive even provides visibility and the supports proactive management toward minimizing excess and obsolete through supply action messages. Great visibility supports better planning and execution both of which support a significant reduction in inventory. Up to 50% as reported by an Amitive customer.

Supply Chain Profile
Amitive is the first to give supply chain professionals a single view of their entire supply chain, on-demand, via the Supply Chain Profile. In a single, time bucketed dashboard, Amitive gives you a complete supply profile for any given product, at any given location including summary supply, summary demand and the net difference for the time period selected. Unroll supply and/or demand and you can see further detail.

Traditional systems allow users to view an item one at a time with some visibility into other aspects of the supply chain. Amitive Unity provides a leading edge concept to allow users, like yourself, to view more than one item at a time, even the entire catalog at once. That’s great and a lot of data, what am I going to do with it all. . . . But wait . . . Amitive Unity provides a visual representation of exceptions where actions need to take place. So users don’t have to search through all the items, looking for trouble, but can drill down on the section where an exception exists and view what item and action(s) need to be taken. Not only can a planner, but also a materials manager, CEO, CFO determine the health of their supply chain and see where exceptions are taking place. Now users can drill into that time bucket to identify the item and take action.

The Supply Chain Profile allows any level of user, from Senior Mgmt down to the buyer to take the pulse of the supply chain. From a consolidated view, of all filtered items, Amitive illustrates where exceptions are occurring. No longer is there a need to review reams of paper, simply drill down on the exception to see understand the cause and actions needed to rectify the situation. Now anyone, from the CEO to the Materials Mgr, can quickly understand the pulse of their supply chain. Buyers can quickly understand what actions they need to take to ensure proper flow of goods to balance inventory requirements with preventing backorders, and reduce excess and obsolete inventory.

Brand Owner Inventory Management
Amitive supports both distribution and flow-through inventory management by brand owners. The distribution model allows brand owners to receive and distribute product via owned or contracted warehouses. Flow-through management is managed via drop-ship with products moving directly from manufacturers to resellers or end customers.

For the distribution model, Amitive allows you to receive product into inventory based on Purchase Order, Supplier Shipment with internal ASN, or via integration. You can control inventory with Adjustment, Hold, Hold in transit, and Release features, including release date. Amitive inventory categories include:

• On Hand
• On Hold
• Allocated
• Available
• In-Transit
• ‘Owned by’
   o Owner may own
   o Customer may own (i.e. procured but owner storing it. Owner to track but no valuation
• VMI
   o Owner inventory into Customer
   o Supplier Inventory into Owner
      • Inventory shown but no value – PO put in place to move ‘ownership’

Landed Cost
Amitive supports landed cost so you can determine the fully loaded cost of a product and source from the supplier providing the optimum total cost, not just the best product price. Amitive lets you look into your inventory valuation and segregate into different categories instead of evaluating a lump sum summary and trying to decipher the various components. Amitive’s categorization provides users with the ability to better understand the costs of good and focus on the areas that might be out of alignment. With this detail in hand, you can make better choices or you might choose to further negotiate toward a better outcome based on those more detailed costs.

Inbound/Outbound Inventory Operations

Inbound
Amitive provides users with the ability to create inbound shipments manually, through an uploader, or through integration. Amitive supports package level configuration for shipments, including nested packaging. Providing this functionality, along with part control detail within each package, will provide a level of detail traceability sufficient for any role within the company.

Once a shipment is created, an internal ASN, which is utilized for tracking and execution within both logistics and receiving, is sent notifying the receiver of goods in transit.

“Where is my stuff?” – this question can now be easily answered with Amitive. Since supplier shipments contain not only items within a package, but may also contain the part control information, detailed tracking and visibility can be achieved at the shipment, package, and item levels. Amitive can easily identify where an item is during its inbound journey. By providing this information, users can understand which itinerary leg an item is in, and what necessary measures can be taken to expedite the shipment, package, or item.

Unity provides the ability to control shipment of inbound items and even allows users to put goods on hold. This provides even more visibility and control to the Brand Owner, thus allowing him to ensure shipments that are not yet available for consumption cannot be allocated to Sales Orders, yet it allows them to be shipped and received into inventory.

Amitive helps improve receiving efficiencies. With Unity’s online ASN, warehouse personnel can quickly and efficiently receive items into inventory. Each package contains all the information necessary to accurately receive goods with minimal user intervention.

Outbound
Amitive provides the same functionality for outbound orders as they do for inbound orders. The warehouse can create customer shipments and direct how the packaging configuration is performed. Additionally, users can coordinate the tendering process so your logistics providers know when to pick up the shipments, and the details for that shipment including the number of packages, weights, and other pertinent shipment information.

Sales Orders may be allocated against any supply, whether it be physical inventory or inbound supply. Once allocated, sales orders can be prepared for shipment; and if desired package level configuration can be managed.

Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI)
With all inventory and transactions managed on a single, real-time application, Amitive gives you the ultimate platform for VMI management.

Customers are increasingly asking for greater participation in inventory management and ownership. Many want you, the Brand Owner, to own and manage the inventory within their facility until such time as they use it. Not a problem with Unity which can easily handle VMI. Unity’s functionality allows the customer and owner to agree upon what inventory levels to carry and what trigger point to replenish the inventory. Once the items are consumed, via a sales order, an invoice can instantly be generated to improve your cash flow.

Amitive supports VMI on both sides of the supply chain. You can use it to manage your customers’ inventory levels, or allow your suppliers to manage your inventory. The owner can configure the trigger mechanisms that are party-specific, and even create auto processes to execute the orders. Configurations can include:

• Configure inventory levels per customer
• Track ownership while at customer
• Manage inventory at customer location
• SO to decrement from customer location and invoice upon usage
• Supplier visibility to inventory
• Replenishment methods:
   o Party specific settings – customer and supplier
   o Auto replenishment to cust whs location
   o Min/Max, ROP/ROQ, Kan/Ban

Not only can the owner provide VMI services to his customers, Amitive provides functionality in which the supplier can perform VMI services to the Brand Owner. Suppliers would have visibility into the owners inventory, and at a predefined point, a trigger will send messages to the supplier who can execute those actions.

 

All the planning and collaboration combined can’t deliver the right product, in the right quantity, at the right time without flawless fulfillment and logistics management. Amitive was designed to go the final mile to the customer’s door. Having a centralized view of fulfillment means that you can answer customers’ favorite question—where is my order?—rapidly and accurately.

Pick/Pack/Ship
Amitive facilitates outbound pick/pack/ship by the owner or directly from the supplier to the customer via drop-ship. Amitive provides shipment package configuration to maximize shipping productivity.

Shipments in their simplest form can be a collection of items being shipped from one point to another. Shipments can also consist of packages, and packages within packages – a nested shipment. Amitive provides both options to the owner shipping a sales order, the supplier preparing an inbound shipment, or a logistics provider.

Providing information for a nested shipment allows users a more granular visibility into “Where are my goods”. During the package configuration, users can identify not only what items are in each package, but the part control associated with the item. Just imagine, now you can track where a particular item / part control is during in-transit to another location. When exceptions occur and the users need to find detailed part control information related to a shipment, so they can expedite it, put it on hold, or even receive a specific item, the user can easily identify which package to execute the action against.

During the packaging process, users can see the weight of each package. This allows them to build it so that it does not exceed any weight limitation in the warehouse or from the shipment company.

Ever have a situation where information did not match what physically happened? No problem with Amitive and the ability to ‘unwind’ what was done and reverse it back to the prior step(s); or to systematically get item to ‘catch-up’ to where they physically are. Both provide users the ability to easily correct data error and ensure accuracy within the system.

Clear Lines of Visibility
The supply chain is traditionally full of blind spots with fulfillment and logistics being key areas with the least visibility. Amitive provides transportation tracking visibility in-system so you can closely track your in-transit inventory and orders. Giving an even broader scope of control, Amitive not only monitors items and package, but equipment as well (e.g. containers).

With these clear lines of visibility, you can rapidly and confidently answer the questions, “where’s my stuff?”. Further, you can make timely decisions on which container/package to expedite based on demand signals and inbound information.