i2 and the i2 User Group have named the global winners of the Ken Sharma Award of Excellence, which recognizes companies that have made outstanding advancements in supply chain management through deployments of i2 solutions. Essar Steel, one of the world's fastest-growing global steel companies, won the award in the category of Supply Chain Depth and Breadth. Fairchild Semiconductor, a global leader in delivering energy-efficient power analog and power discrete solutions, received the award for Supply Chain Innovation. Kimberly-Clark, a leading global health and hygiene company, won the award in the Supply Chain Return on Investment category.
"In times of economic uncertainty, excellence in supply chain management is critical to a company's success. Essar Steel, Fairchild Semiconductor and Kimberly-Clark have made improvements to their supply chains that have delivered real value to their companies," says Hiten Varia, executive vice president, Global Customer Operations and chief customer officer, i2. "We offer our congratulations to this year's winners."
Co-sponsored by i2 and the i2 User Group, the annual award pays tribute to i2's late co-founder Ken Sharma and is open to hundreds of i2 customers. An independent panel of analysts from AMR Research judged each nominee in the categories of innovation, return on investment, and depth and breadth.
"A focus on supply chain innovation and operations can help companies better manage the increasing complexity, volatile demand and shrinking global markets of today's business environment. The winners of this year's Ken Sharma Award have a good grasp of what it takes to compete in this environment, using supply chain management to help give them a competitive advantage," says Noha Tohamy, research director at AMR Research. "We were impressed by the applicants."
Essar Steel Recognized for Supply Chain Depth and Breadth
One of the world's fastest-growing global steel companies, Essar Steel NV has tripled its capacity in the last two years and has a goal of becoming one of the top 10 global steel producers by 2015. To do this, the company needed world-class supply chain management capabilities to grow profitability, strengthen customer relationships, reduce inventories and increase throughput.
Working with i2, Essar Steel created a new supply chain management organization reporting directly to the CEO. As a driving force for change, recognition of common objectives, and adoption of new practices across the company, the new organization galvanized the company's focus on cross-functional synergies as a key competitive differentiator.
Since implementing a variety of i2 solutions to address advanced order planning and sales and operations planning, Essar Steel has increased forecast accuracy for domestic contract customers by nearly 30 percent. The company has reduced work-in-process inventory and order leads times, in addition to reducing response time for customer inquiries from two to three hours to six seconds.
Fairchild Semiconductor Recognized for Supply Chain Innovation
Fairchild Semiconductor is a global leader in delivering energy-efficient power analog and power discrete solutions for consumer, communications, industrial, mobile, computing and automotive systems.
Fairchild's overall business driver was to achieve "perfect order delivery performance." With i2 solutions implemented across the entire their entire supply chain, Fairchild has been able to improve asset utilization and capital deployment, reduce inventories and associated costs, improve gross margins, increase market share and better align its systems with its overall business model.Â
Since working with i2, Fairchild is able to address its entire product portfolio and business rules within one supply chain planning engine. Additionally, Fairchild is able to optimize capacities, inventories and customer commitments across all product lines while using one set of standard business rules.The company estimates it will save $20 million during the next four years based on published industry research. Fairchild has also improved its perfect order rate by two full percentage points.
Kimberly-Clark Recognized for Supply Chain Return on Investment
In an effort to build competitive strength, Kimberly-Clark, a leading global health and hygiene company, sought to implement a new transportation management system along with a business process redesign to reduce its transportation spend. With operations heavily focused in North America and Europe, the company gathered business leaders from those regions to identify synergies that would support more strategic operations and enable cost reductions. Using those findings, i2 worked with Kimberly-Clark to implement a common transportation tool and business processes.
By implementing several i2 transportation solutions, and by leveraging optimization capabilities to achieve rate reductions prior to implementation, Kimberly-Clark has achieved US$8.77 million in savings in North America at the time of its Ken Sharma Award application. During that same time frame, the company also saved US$1.6 million as a result of its implementation in Europe.
About Ken Sharma
Vice chairman and senior partner of i2 from 1988 until his death in 1999, Ken Sharma made an impact on the development of supply chain management technology that resonates today. Sharma worked to define and redefine the concepts of global optimization, multi-enterprise planning, master planning and supply chain planning. His leadership and vision not only helped make i2 a top provider of supply chain solutions, but also changed the paradigms by which industries understand concepts such as supply chain planning and technology.
—By Rosalynn Vasquez
