E2open announced the release of its third-quarter technology update with enhancements across the entire product portfolio. Highlights include the launch of reimagined channel incentives workflows, unified inline value-added services for transportation bookings and a new level of end-to-end collaboration across and beyond enterprise boundaries. Companies can benefit from higher productivity and usability, improved business efficiencies and better abilities to quickly leverage opportunities and manage disruptions across channel as well as supply chain operations.
“With every release, E2open pushes the boundaries of technology allowing our clients to reimagine their end-to-end business processes,” said Pawan Joshi, executive vice president of product management and strategy at E2open. “This release is another step towards delivering our vision of bringing all the data and applications on a holistic platform allowing our clients to innovate in ways that are otherwise out of reach. These range from complete redefinition of established industry practices to create next-generation offerings to value-adding standard workflows, and anything in between. In each case, the goal is to make it easier and more intuitive for users to achieve better business outcomes and help companies take another step towards digital transformation.“
Further salient enhancements in this release include:
Channel Shaping
- Next generation Partner Performance Incentives application delivers engaging user experience and blazingly fast performance. This differentiated design brings together industry best practices for incenting partners to drive higher sales, increase partner engagement, simplify financial reporting, minimize financial and compliance risks and lower the cost of running complex programs.
- The new Harmony® user interface brings a simple, modern and intuitive experience empowering users to perform a full range of activities that previously required expert assistance. Brand owners gain a new level of agility to quickly launch programs and then validate and approve incentive calculations to ensure accurate and on-time payments. Partners can track performance and accrued incentives while working with brand owners to resolve discrepancies in advance of being paid.
Demand Sensing and Business Planning
- Enhanced self-serve capabilities enables fast, on-the-fly configuration for planning horizons and user-defined KPI measures, and configurable disaggregation strategies. These capabilities simplify planning model setup and maintenance, improving planner productivity while providing more relevant forecasts.
- Artificial intelligence based automated cannibalization impact analysis for similar but non-promoted products during promotional events. This significantly reduces the time and effort spent on event planning and creates more realistic revenue estimates for promotions performance.
Global Trade Management and Global Knowledge®
- E2open’s customers can now leverage Canada’s Least Developed Country Tariff (LDCT) preferential trade program. Suppliers in the least developed countries can be solicited, requesting preferential origin and preference criteria.
- Enhanced USMCA support for automotive manufacturers helps eliminate import duties by determining and documenting the regional value content of their goods. Manufacturers of passenger vehicles, light trucks and heavy trucks can ‘true-up‘ Regional Value Content (RVC) calculations at the end of the elected averaging period to comply with provisions under Article-5 of “Provisions related to the product-specific rules of origin for automotive goods” within USMCA.
- Enhanced U.S. Export Controls and U.S. AES Filing helps exporters manage the expansion of controls (export, re-export and transfer) for military end-use or military end–users in China, Russia and Venezuela.
Transportation and Logistics
- E2open’s network is now integrated with Uber Freight®. Shippers can rate, tender and manage freight directly from Transportation Management through seamless integration with more than 60,000 carriers, available 24/7, providing access to additional capacity and pricing. Shippers can reduce transportation spend and improve performance by comparing real-time rates and lanes against contract carrier rates.
- Shippers and freight forwarders can now include value-added service offers from participating ocean carriers such as cargo insurance, cargo security services (e.g. bar locks), priority loading (guarantees space on the selected vessel) during the booking process. This feature is designed to guarantee, protect and secure the shipper’s cargo, at the same time saving the shipper time and money.
- New Ocean Shipment Track & Trace API enables shippers and freight forwarders to access milestone events in near real-time within any decision-making system. Enabling this visibility for all critical milestone events for all containers associated with a shipment provides end users with powerful support for making fast and efficient transportation planning or re-planning decisions.
- Shippers taking advantage of spot rates for ocean bookings on E2open’s INTTRA® platform can now see any charges and penalties related to the rate. This allows clients to proactively avoid charges or potential penalties they were not aware of at the time of booking.
- Carriers can now manage contract-based pricing rules with 3PLs and transporters for container pick-up or drop-off requests directly through E2open’s Container Management application. This enables carriers to add detailed contract rate information for specific volumes, time frames and locations so that truckers can take advantage of preferred rates. This is a benefit for all parties – allowing carriers to optimize contract usage and transporters get paid at the best rate available.
Collaborative Manufacturing
- Improved automation enables business management teams to make bulk updates to manufacturing workflow tasks for monitoring, collaborating and resolving exceptions related to regulatory compliance, yield optimization and quality management across the entire product lifecycle, including design, prototyping and production. This eliminates the time and effort previously spent manually updating or closing tasks one by one.
Supply Management
- New “E2open Discussions” enables real-time contextual collaboration and ad-hoc problem-solving across partners in a multi-tier supply chain network through new online chat capabilities as part of Harmony. This enhanced collaboration provides a quick, intuitive and efficient means to prevent or resolve disruptions and achieve better business outcomes.
- Greater agility and performance through an improved management-by-exception process, enables teams to review, escalate, comment on and resolve deviations as well as perform data-driven analysis on cycle/resolution time, resulting in faster recovery and reduced impact when a disruption occurs in the supply chain.
- Increased consumer protection and reduced corporate risk through automatic generation of relevant regulatory certificates after successful product tests, and new business rules to prevent the shipment of uncertified goods. Supports General Certificate of Conformity (GCC) as part of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission standard.
- New price variance report automatically identifies discrepanciesbetween actual and forecasted materials costs, allowing commodity managers to proactively address disparities and efficiently reduce costs.
Harmony and Analytics
- Enhanced user configurability of operational and embedded analytics makes it easier to customize charts, drilldowns and scenario comparison capability. Planning teams gain flexibility and significantly reduce the time spent developing supply plans.
- Harmony user experience additions for enhanced contextual help simplifies access to meaningful insights. A new storytelling feature makes it quick and easy to create presentations without additional tools, reducing the time and effort to get insights to decision-makers.
