SAirLogistics and Manugistics set up supply chain management company
SAirLogistics and Manugistics are setting up a supply chain management joint venture called Ixedius. SAirLogistics, which is part of Swiss-based airline organisation SAirGroup, will own 75 per cent and Manugistics 25 per cent.
The aim of the new company, which will start with just four employees but build up to employing ten by the end of this year, is to make Manugistics’ supply chain management and forecasting applications available to small and medium-sized companies in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Italy on an ASP (application service provider) basis.
Mark Stolz, chief executive officer of Ixedius, defines its target market as companies with more than one production centre and a turnover of under CHF1 billion ($605 million), particularly in the footwear, apparel and hi-tech industries. Such companies, he says, are often too small to afford supply chain planning software in their own right.
“With Ixedius, they won’t have to change their existing systems or spend a fortune on consultancy fees. They can just feed us data and get planning data back,” says Stolz. However, he agrees that Ixedius will require customers to have an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, such as SAP, installed to run effectively. “I think the time is right,” he continues. “Quite a lot of SAP customers have spent the last few years getting their system up and running, and the logical next step is to link into logistics planning.”
Among the functions Ixedius will offer will be demand planning, distribution requirement planning, and transportation management. “At some point, we might even go into the co-ordination of shipments but only in a non-asset-based way,” comments Stolz.
For Manugistics, the venture is an extension into Europe of the ASP services it already offers in the USA. “We decided to tie up with SAirLogistics because they have the brand recognition in this market and so can get to market faster,” says Richard Bergmann, Manugistics president.
Klaus Knappik, chief executive officer of SAirLogistics, admits that its interest is partly as an investor – SAirGroup has a longstanding policy of diversifying away from its core Swissair airline business – but also because “logistics is a future industry”. The stocks of logistics companies have not suffered nearly as much as other companies, he claims.
Interestingly, Knappik says the idea of developing Ixedius came from the process of designing a new hi-tech cargo terminal in Zurich for the SAirLogistics air cargo handling business CargoLogic. “We nearly failed miserably because we assumed that the air cargo people knew best. Then we realised that this was just like a car parts centre and got in logistics specialists. Some of those skills spilled over into this project,” he explains.
