July - 2005 issue > On The Cover

By Pradeep Shankar

In the book—The World Is Flat, the latest bestseller by Thomas Friedman; the New York Times columnist writes about his Dell notebook. He requested Dell to trace all the parts that went into his laptop, where it came from, including the names of the people who assembled it. Astonishingly, there were 400 different suppliers and 30 key parts that came from at least 30 different countries. And what you see when you look at the supply chain, it runs along coastal China, through Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, through the Philippines and Thailand.

The changing market dynamics is compelling global companies like Dell to source products from across the globe. Also, timely introduction of new products is equally important, which means the entire supply chain is changed rapidly and the need for solutions to manage such change in a quick and efficient manner is increasing.

Sanjiv Sidhu, chairman and founder of i2 technologies—a man widely credited as being one of the first to recognize the opportunity in the supply chain—is gearing up to take advantage of new business environment. In the hey days of the Internet era, i2’s revenue soared to $1.1 billion—only to fall quickly, the dot-com bust, financial shortfalls, and much-publicized conflicts with customers such as Nike only added to the company’s woes. Yet i2 survived.

Sidhu says the company is back on track following new customer wins, as well as increases in i2’s net income and operating revenue. He is hoping to cash in on the outsourcing phenomena. “Customers are looking at ways of handling the supply chain in an outsourcing world where there has been an explosion of product variety, complexity and variability. It plays to i2’s strengths,” he says.

At the company’s headquarters in Dallas and R&D center in Bangalore, India a team of engineers—i2ers as they are called, are developing the framework of what is called the next generation supply chain; promising quantum leap in productivity. One primary trait of next-generation SCM is demand-supply synchronization, characterized by real-time demand management integration.

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