This morning we put out a press release summarizing our recently completed Kinexions user conference.  As you’ll see in the release, we really had a great agenda this year with some excellent third-party speakers sharing some tremendous insights.  We even did some research with the attendees and the findings have been noted in the release.

I’ve also posted a couple of video interviews with Larry Lapide on “The effect of oil prices on the supply chain” and “The future of supply chain management.”

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Keynotes at Kinaxis Conference Advocate Aligning Demand-Supply Chain Management with Business Strategies
Kinexions ’08 User Conference Showcases Benefits of Integrated Demand and Supply Chain Management for Manufacturers and Brand Owners

Ottawa, Canada, November 10, 2008 — Kinaxis™ Inc., provider of the on-demand RapidResponse service that empowers multi-enterprise manufacturers with the collaborative and integrated demand-supply planning, monitoring, and response capabilities required in today’s complex and dynamic world, recently held its Annual User Conference – Kinexions ‘08 – in Chicago.  Attendees at the two-day event included some of the world’s largest brand owners and manufacturers, with collective revenue totaling more than $537 billion USD.

The keynote speakers for the event were Shoshanah Cohen, director of PRTM’s Global Supply Chain Innovation practice, and Larry Lapide, Ph.D, director of demand management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), and research director for the Demand Management Solutions Group, of which Kinaxis is a member. Their respective keynote addresses identified demand and supply chain management as a competitive advantage and corporate business strategy enabler.  Their remarks highlighted the need for companies to improve collaboration between demand and supply-side management, as well as use supply chain management to further strategic corporate goals.

Kinaxis customers shared best practices on leveraging RapidResponse as a single solution that could solve a multitude of their diverse supply chain management challenges. Case study presentations included sessions by a select group of market leaders, namely:

• EMC
• John Deere
• Qualcomm
• Raytheon
• Teradyne

For its users, RapidResponse is serving as a platform for continuous demand-supply alignment, and enabling them to replace inefficient and ineffective legacy supply chain planning systems, ad hoc processes and multiple spreadsheets. Companies are focused on leveraging RapidResponse to support action on multiple fronts, fully capitalizing on its broad scope of benefits.  As one customer stated, their goal in leveraging RapidResponse is to continually promote “more users–more uses–more value.”

Throughout the conference, the need for integrating demand and supply management was a prevalent theme, and was overwhelmingly supported by the results of a survey completed by attendees, whereby 63 percent of respondents rated the importance of integrating planning, monitoring and response within their organization as “extremely important”.  Incorporating collaborative insight and human judgment into supply chain processes was also heavily emphasized and reinforced by survey results, with 90 percent of respondents rating its value as “important” or “extremely important.”

Learn more about the event highlights and related discussions – in particular Larry Lapide’s industry commentary offered while at Kinexions– on the Kinaxis blog: www.21stcenturysupplychain.com.

About Kinaxis
Kinaxis™ RapidResponse is a single on-demand service that empowers multi-enterprise manufacturers with collaborative and integrated demand-supply planning, monitoring, and response capabilities. RapidResponse embraces human judgment to enable planners and front-line responders to handle unpredictable changes. Global leaders such as Casio, Honeywell, Jabil, Qualcomm, and Raytheon use RapidResponse to achieve breakthroughs in sales and operations planning (S&OP), demand management, supply management, and supply chain risk management. The results are superior customer service, improved operations performance, and a competitive market advantage. For more information, visit the Kinaxis web site at www.kinaxis.com or the company’s blog at www.21stcenturysupplychain.com.

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