SCT Partners, Aims At Supply Chain For Process Firms

SCT, a maker of enterprise software for the process industries, this month announced an alliance with ecFood.com in an effort to provide a seamless online trading platform for food suppliers and wholesale buyers. At the same time, SCT unveiled an ambitious plan to help process manufacturers in a variety of industries harness the power of the Internet. With ecFood.com, the goal is to "bring velocity and liquidity to the food industry," says Marc Rudov, vice president of marketing and business development at the Santa Clara, Calif. 1999 start-up. The idea is to mesh SCT's process-industry software with ecFood.com's online trading marketplace to allow large players in the food business to do business seamlessly online. SCT also inaugurated its iProcess.sct system, a Web-based supply-chain system that process companies can use to integrate their operations with those of both suppliers and customers. At separate meetings held over three weeks in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and London, SCT executives Mike Taylor, vice president for business strategy, and Jim Brown, general manager of solutions strategy, demonstrated the new software to press and analysts. One company that already is using SCT's Adage enterprise resource planning system is Blue Diamond Growers, a Sacramento-based cooperative of more than 3,700 almond growers in California's Sacramento Valley. Blue Diamond, a $450 million cooperative that provides about one-fourth of the world supply of almonds, operates seven almond receiving centers in California, and has plants in California, Oregon, and Tokyo. Says Lawrence M. Dicke, vice president-finance and CFO at Blue Diamond: "Their software has been a big help for us in managing a complex supply chain." He adds that Blue Diamond chose SCT over the larger ERP software firms because "it's designed for process companies, and most other ERP systems are designed for discrete manufacturing."