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 ...
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."