Bob Trebilcock

Mitrix relaunches as Amitive

Software as a Service, or SaaS, may still represent a relatively small percentage of the supply chain software market, but it’s making its presence known in two ways. These are solutions that are hosted centrally, accessed over the web, and paid for on a subscription basis – you only pay for what you use and the provider takes care of maintenance and upgrades.

First there are the small-to-mid-size companies that need functionality, maybe even best-of-breed functionality, but don’t have the manpower or financial resources to commit to an IT department and software licenses. Think application providers like NetSuite for ERP functionality and SmartTurn for supply chain execution functionality.

Next are applications that can link together a community of trading partners. Think transportation management and supply chain collaboration.  

Then there’s Amitive. A relaunch of Mitrix, Amitive mixes the two, a supply chain collaboration platform designed for small-to-mid-market companies that rely on outsourced manufacturing.

“The derivation of the name comes from community,” says Sean Rollings, vice president of marketing. “We built this solution from the ground up to focus on the needs around outsourced manufacturing, and to focus on it for the mid-market. All of our evangelism is around community supply chain management. We believe that if you’re relying on third parties for your manufacturing, you have to manage by leadership and by forming a community where suppliers and partners are working together.”

A little history. The original solution was created by Mitsui, a Japanese conglomerate that, among other things, has a logistics arm that does 4PL work for companies around the world. Mitsui built its own software platform to manage the supply chains it was running for its customers. In 2003, the company saw an opportunity to spin that solution off and Mitrix was born. A few years later, Mitrix was bought out by venture capitalists. They brought in Amar Singh, a supply chain executive at SAP, as CEO. His focus was on product development, rather than business development.

“The idea was to back off on sales and build the next generation platform,” says Rollings. “And, we focused on making it a platform for collaboration first, and building supply chain functionality second.”  

Rollings contends that focus on collaboration – on enabling a community of trading partners – is what makes Amitive different.

“A lot of the solutions out there were built for manufacturing-centric environments,” says Rollings. “The focus is on the factory. Those solutions aren’t designed to handle manufacturing when it moves from inside the enterprise to outside the enterprise. And in our view the mid-market has been ignored.”

The re-launched product focuses on four key areas:

Supply chain collaboration: The platform manages all the data and transactions for a community of trading partners on a global basis.

Community business process management: The solution enables forecast management, inventory management, procurement, fulfillment and logistics. The goal is to manage end to end processes for the community.

Intelligent decision-making support: The solution gathers data from a variety of systems to monitor changes in supply and demand and evaluate their impact upstream and downstream. The system then notifies the primary players involved in that event to collaborate on a solution.

System of record for operations: While individual partners in the supply chain will have their own supply chain systems, by running that data through the Amitive solution, all the data is in one place for real-time visibility across the supply chain.

Now that the solution has been relaunched after a nearly two year redesign, what’s the next step?

“Sales,” says Rollings.

Posted by Bob Trebilcock on October 31, 2008 | Comments (0)