Fujitsu Launches glovia.com 7 Extended ERP Suite for Global Manufacturers

Fujitsu Limited and its El Segundo, Calif.-based subsidiary, Glovia International, Inc., a leading provider of extended ERP solutions, today announced the availability of glovia.com 7, an enhanced new version of the glovia.com extended ERP suite. The culmination of two years of development effort and multinational customer input, glovia.com 7 offers substantially increased functionality to support for the business needs of manufacturers with global operations and complex business structures. Fujitsu's glovia.com has already established a successful track record of deployments at approximately one thousand sites worldwide, and it is also being used to coordinate operations at some 30 production facilities in Fujitsu's own global manufacturing network.

glovia.com 7 introduces an enhanced global business model that enables companies to improve their supply chain performance - from materials procurement through production and sales - by centralizing demand and supply management, while allowing for local optimization of production. Designed specifically for companies with multiple product lines and production facilities, the new solution enables manufacturers to create a comprehensive, enterprise-wide view of total demand by aggregating forecast and customer order data from sales, marketing, channels and customers, as well as to drill down to detailed information.

At the same time, the solution's ability to integrate and manage operating status information for every individual production line and plant, as well as parts inventory and other supply data, enables global demand to be optimally apportioned to the appropriate local production facility. Manufacturers can thus increase the accuracy and reliability of their forecasts, improve on-time delivery performance, decrease excess inventory, and reduce costs, while having the flexibility to meet changing customer demand.

Based on input from Fujitsu's and Glovia International's customer base of leading global manufacturers, as well as Fujitsu's own experience using glovia.com, more than 60 unique enhancements have been made to the core ERP functionality of glovia.com 7. This includes functions designed for specific industries, such as the automotive and machine-tool industries, as well as specific modes of production, such as mass-production or engineered-to-order and made-to-order production processes.

glovia.com 7 also includes functionality for managing the entire order fulfillment business process, enabling manufacturers to synchronize orders with planned production. Using a memory-resident, constraint-based optimization engine, the solution determines the best possible supply scenario for given demand. The integrated planning engine takes into account global resources and commitments, including capacity, inventory, orders, critical resources as well as cross-plant and plant-to-customer lead times. The order fulfillment solution includes real-time available-to-promise (ATP) functionality as well as sophisticated business rules that allow manufacturers to instantly offer alternative configurations and substitutions to meet customer delivery dates.

The new solution also provides manufacturers with a proven collaborative business integration platform that helps them integrate with their customers and trading partners to share information and automate critical business processes. Based on an open XML framework, the platform allows manufacturers to easily exchange information across disparate systems, whether internal or external. glovia.com 7 is complemented by Fujitsu's enterprise application integration (EAI) solution, Interstage Collaboration Ring, to facilitate the quick and economical creation of XML-based integrated information-sharing environments. The solution is a key element in Fujitsu's Interstage suite of collaborative business integration offerings, which have been implemented in more than 31,000 enterprise systems worldwide.

To meet the requirements of customers with global operations, the same version of glovia.com 7 will be offered on a worldwide basis, backed up by Fujitsu's and Glovia International's global support network. Furthermore, Fujitsu has recently strengthened its support capabilities in China, where an increasing number of global manufacturers are shifting their production, with the establishment of a support center at Beijing Fujitsu System Engineering Co.