IMI, i2 Alliance Aims At Traditional ERP Market

i2 Technologies Inc. and Industri-Matematik International Corp. (IMI) took a bigger stab at the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market earlier this month with an alliance that promises to marry the former's scheduling capabilities with the latter's high-volume order-execution software. Working together, the two companies will be shooting for an even greater slice of the ERP software market's sweet spot -- the automation of the customer order through production all the way to delivery. "Adding Industri-Matematik's integrated order execution software to i2 software fulfills the goal of true collaborative planning -- enabling timely, end-to-end planning, synchronized with outstanding execution, across a global supply chain," says Greg Brady, president of i2 in Irving, Tex. IMI is headquartered in Tarrytown, N.Y. "Today's supply-chain concepts stretch beyond the limits of ERP systems, which were modeled on an enterprise of 30 years ago," says Ann Grackin, a partner at Benchmarking Partners Inc., an information technology research firm in Cambridge, Mass. "The i2/Indusri-Matematik solution is designed for companies with supply-chain initiatives that seek to manage collaborative customer relationships with profitable results."