Adexa Introduces Collaborative Demand Planner.

Business Editors

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 25, 2000

New iCollaboration Module Improves Accuracy, Reduces Time to Generate

Demand Forecasts by Enabling Stakeholders to Collaborate Via the

Internet and View Personalized Supply Chain Information

Adexa(TM), Inc. (formerly Paragon Management Systems), the leading provider of collaborative planning solutions critical to e-business, today announced at the Gartner Group Collaborative Commerce conference the introduction of the Collaborative Demand Planner(TM) (CDP), the latest addition to Adexa's iCollaboration suite. Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner is a 100 percent Internet application that enables multiple stakeholders -- both within the enterprise and beyond -- to collaborate on demand data in real time to quickly converge to a consensus forecast. In addition to compressing the time it takes to generate a forecast from weeks to days, CDP helps users make more informed business decisions by providing them with personalized access to live supply chain information via the Internet.

Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner enables companies in industries with volatile demand, such as high tech/electronics, to enhance their forecasting processes for the increased needs of e-business where mistakes in under- or over-estimating demand can cost companies dearly in poor customer service or excess inventory. CDP improves the accuracy and speed of forecasting by enabling multiple stakeholders - such as sales representatives, finance managers, senior executives, demand planners, suppliers and customers -- to work together in a real-time, Internet-based planning environment.

"Collaborative Demand Planner represents Adexa's latest effort to provide companies with the solutions they need to succeed in e-business," said Udo Dengler, chief technology officer of Adexa, Inc. "While other demand planning systems have rigid and inflexible data hierarchies and can only be used by dedicated demand planners, CDP's scalability, multi-threaded architecture and fully definable data model make it a powerful e-business tool."

The faster and more accurate demand forecasting made possible with Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner delivers valuable benefits to companies, including:

     --   Greater market responsiveness - through more frequent
          planning cycles that help balance supply with demand.
     --   Increased customer service - by manufacturing products
          customers want, when they want it and at the right price and
          by providing value-added customer services such as advanced
          notification of product shortfalls and discounted items.
     --   Increased profits and market share - by ramping up
          production quickly for new product introductions, commanding
          premium prices through faster time-to-market, and preventing
          cost overruns through greater operational efficiency and
          better return-on-assets.
     --   Reduced excess and obsolete inventory - by only making what
          customers are buying.
     --   Greater collaboration - by enabling multiple stakeholders to
          work through the Internet to quickly reach a consensus on
          forecasts.

Built for the Internet

In both design and execution, Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner harnesses the Internet to ensure "anytime, anywhere" access to information and ease of use. The multi-threaded, thin-client architecture of CDP enables concurrent and distributed planning across diverse communities of users - both within the enterprise and beyond - via the Internet. At the same time, CDP's browser interface makes collaborative planning an easy-to-learn, intuitive experience for novice users. Since it has the look-and-feel and navigation of a standard Web browser, users can quickly become proficient with the application.

Closing the Loop between Supply and Demand Planning

Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner is the only forecasting solution to close the loop between supply and demand planning because of its native integration with Adexa's constraint-based planning solutions, Supply Chain Planner and Material and Capacity Planner. The integration provides users with the unique ability to simultaneously view and compare the unconstrained and constrained forecasts to help them effectively maintain a synchronized supply chain, as well as immediately recognize demand/supply shortfalls.

Configurable to Any Business

Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner allows demand data to be represented and tracked in an unlimited variety of ways so it can be configured to the business needs of any company. CDP uses a rich, yet flexible, object model to define an unlimited number of attribute dimensions, groupings and hierarchies within any dimension. Since the planning hierarchy within CDP is completely definable, users have unrestricted flexibility in organizing, aggregating, analyzing, modifying and viewing demand information.

Personalized Information Views to Simplify Analysis

Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner blends powerful online analytical processing (OLAP) technology with configurable visualization tools to enable users to view and interact with the latest demand data via the Internet - whenever and however they want to see it. CDP enables users to flexibly view, analyze and override data at any level of the planning hierarchy by creating personal subsets, or "data cubes," that are pre-configured to unique business roles - such as sales managers, field sales, demand planners, product managers, financial analysts, suppliers, channel partners and even customers. By providing users with real-time access to personalized supply chain information, CDP enables users to make more informed business decisions.

Powerful Security

Since CDP provides users all over the world with access to sensitive business information, security is a critical component of Adexa's solution. CDP enables administrators to assign data access and data modification privileges on a user-specific basis.

Automated Monitoring and Messaging

At the core of Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner is a powerful automated monitoring and messaging network that alerts users to changes in the demand forecast. CDP's intelligent "listener" engine continually monitors the collaborative planning network and automatically sends alerts to appropriate users when inconsistencies, supply/demand shortfalls or other user-defined exceptions are discovered in system data.

Seamless Integration with External Systems

The open, single data model architecture of Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner enables companies to quickly maximize their existing technology infrastructure. CDP has standard interfaces with enterprise application such as ERP, CRM, MRP, Order Entry, Accounting, Distribution and other systems to simplify integration.

While CDP is already integrated with Adexa's own powerful forecasting engine, it can also easily pull data from other forecasting tools, including home-grown systems that may contain customized or proprietary statistical algorithms. The open and flexible data hierarchy of CDP can precisely replicate the relational data structures of other forecasting systems.

General availability of Adexa's Collaborative Demand Planner is planned for May 2000. As with Adexa's other solutions, Collaborative Demand Planner can be used as a stand-alone solution or an integrated component of iCollaboration.

About Adexa

Headquartered in Los Angeles with sales and support offices worldwide, Adexa, Inc. (formerly Paragon Management Systems) the leading vendor in collaborative commerce, develops and markets collaborative planning solutions critical to e-business. Adexa's solutions enable customers, trading partners, portals and application service providers to collaborate intelligently and deliver value-added services to customers and suppliers more quickly and profitably. Adexa's software and professional services enhance the value of complementary enterprise applications and reflect the company's unmatched understanding of and experience in solving unique business needs. Customers include General Motors, Hitachi, UMC Group, Malden Mills, Rowe Furniture, Lucent Technologies and Toshiba. To learn more about Adexa and its solutions, please visit www.adexa.com.