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World's Largest Paint Company Uses iWay to Optimize B2B Relationships
AkzoNobel Connects Easily With Business Units, Partners, and Suppliers Worldwide via iWay Trading Partner Manager
| Source: Information Builders
NASHVILLE, TN--(Marketwire - June 9, 2009) - Integration technology and services from iWay
Software are helping global industrial manufacturing leader AkzoNobel build
its business the old fashioned way: by forging stronger relationships with
customers and suppliers. The world's largest paints and coatings company
depends on iWay Trading Partner Manager to set up, manage, and monitor
online relationships with partners and distributors across multiple trading
networks. iWay Software, an Information Builders company and an innovator
of enterprise
integration solutions, deployed its
Business-to-Business (B2B) Suite to help AkzoNobel manage this vast and
diverse information landscape, simplifying exchanges among many different
trading networks, message sets, and protocols while also connecting
AkzoNobel's internal business units worldwide.
"Our overriding objective is to make it easier for our partners to do
business with us," said Bas Van Amerom, eSupply chain manager at AkzoNobel.
"iWay Trading Partner Manager simplifies our relationships. Now we can
easily connect to partners no matter what kinds of systems they are using.
iWay is boosting productivity and reducing costs for us."
iWay Trading Partner Manager manages information among trading partners by
making B2B interactions a natural extension of an organization's SOA efforts. AkzoNobel also uses iWay Business
Activity Monitor (BAM) to supply real-time information about the status
and results of partner processes and transactions.
With help from Information Builders Professional Services, AkzoNobel
standardized on iWay to streamline its vendor-managed inventory (VMI)
processes, enabling materials suppliers to take responsibility for raw
materials inventory. The integration initiative has had a positive impact
on the bottom line by freeing up working capital and minimizing inventory
carrying costs. Using iWay, suppliers can schedule deliveries whenever they
want. This enables them to optimize quantities of on-hand materials based
on real-time forecasts of manufacturing schedules and production runs.
"Lowering the required physical stock has advantages to everybody in the
supply chain, but we need to be able to reliably share information to make
it happen," said Van Amerom. "iWay Software helped us construct a B2B
gateway to set up and maintain thousands of partner relationships in a
highly reliable framework."
AkzoNobel is globally organized into 18 business units. Suppliers and
customers connect to these business units via a variety of enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems. AkzoNobel needed a central hub to facilitate
these connections. Within six months, the Amsterdam, Netherlands-based
company was testing system-to-system interfaces via iWay Trading Partner
Manager and monitoring those connections with iWay's BAM. Formerly,
establishing an interface with a new vendor could take AkzoNobel many days
of coding. According to Van Amerom, iWay has cut that time nearly in half.
"iWay has a successful history of helping customers tackle extraordinarily
complex infrastructure challenges with our B2B solutions," said Gerald
Cohen, founder and CEO of Information Builders. "As AkzoNobel has learned,
having the right technical infrastructure in place allows a company to
focus on relationships rather than wrestling with technology."
About AkzoNobel
Based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, AkzoNobel makes and supplies a huge
range of paints, coatings and specialty chemicals. As a major producer of
specialty chemicals, AkzoNobel supplies industries worldwide with quality
ingredients for life's essentials. The company has 60,000 employees in more
than 80 countries. Its pro forma 2007 revenue totaled EUR 14.4 bln.
About iWay Software
iWay Software's integration methodology is simple: it uses a single,
integrated set of graphical design tools to assemble powerful pre-built
components for enterprise-class business-to-business (B2B) integration,
business process automation (BPA), or enterprise information management
(EIM) integration scenarios -- without the use of custom code. Integration
configurations can be deployed in a stand-alone manner to any environment
supporting a JVM -- or to Web application servers from any vendor. iWay
delivers the fastest, most cost-effective, and simplest way to integrate
and streamline critical business processes. iWay Software's vendor-,
platform-, and protocol-neutral solutions achieve the promise of SOA: true
reusability. For more information visit: http://www.iwaysoftware.com
About Information Builders
Information Builders' award-winning combination of business intelligence
and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions
to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the
world's most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides
the security, scalability and flexibility needed at every level of global
extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical,
and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users.
Information Builders' iWay Software suite provides state of the art,
multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management
requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading
software platform providers. Together, these products give Information
Builders' customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their
needs.
Information Builders' customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S.
federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices
worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business
partners. More information is available at
http://www.informationbuilders.com.