Manugistics solutions to avail of Datamatics, MegaVisa services
By Our Convergence Bureau | 23 Jun 2003
Mumbai: Manugistics Group Inc (www.manugistics.com), a leading global provider of supply chain and demand chain optimisation solutions, has announced its entry into the Indian market through reseller agreements with leading IT companies Datamatics (www.datamatics.com) and MegaVisa (www.megavisa.com). Manugistics' supply chain management and pricing optimisation solutions offer a full spectrum of products and services to enterprise customers seeking to optimise operations in the increasingly competitive business environment of today.
Manugistics' solutions incorporate global best practices and are designed to help address the challenges in specific industry verticals, and will be available to Indian companies for the first time through these strategic agreements with Datamatics and MegaVisa. This new collaboration will enable the companies to offer tremendous value to companies in India seeking to compete more effectively both domestically and in international markets.
By implementing Manugistics SCM (supply chain management) solutions, companies can see a significant increase in overall efficiency, and optimise many core business functions in order to help minimise costs and enhance profits. These include sourcing, manufacturing, storage, distribution, transportation and pricing.
Indian media reports estimate the global supply chain and logistics market at around $3 trillion. Of this, the market size for supply chain (logistics spend) in India is $50 billion per year, which is 13 per cent of the nation's gross domestic product. It is estimated that in India the logistics cost for manufactured goods account for almost 30 per cent of the total cost — revealing a huge opportunity for Manugistics, as the international standard is 5 to 10 per cent.
"We believe that interest in Manugistics proven solutions in the Indian market will be quite strong," says Michael Christensen, senior vice-president of Manugistics and president of Asian operations. "We are already working in concert with Datamatics and MegaVisa on several engagements — further strengthening our presence among the Manugistics customer base in the Asia Pacific region."
"We are viewing India as a long-term strategic operation, not only as a market of great potential, but as a base for our development team and for building consulting resources for global deployment," continues Christensen. "We see a lot of synergy here — Manugistics is clearly a market leader in the areas of consumer packaged goods, retail, life sciences, chemicals and energy, which are the growth segments of the Indian economy. Thus our solutions will be ideal for organisations in these sectors, seeking optimise operations to compete with their local and global counterparts."
Manugistics chose Datamatics and MegaVisa for their unique capabilities, deep domain expertise in various industry verticals, and the resources required to implement complex SCM projects and integrate Manugistics' applications with customers' existing IT infrastructure in a timely and cost-effective manner.
With offices in key cities across the country, both Datamatics and MegaVisa are well placed to provide local support to customers as and when required according to their changing needs. The choice of these partners is also based on the specific domain expertise in industry verticals.
"Increasingly our customers in the manufacturing and distribution segments are under pressure to reduce costs and improve service levels. Manugistics' approach, linking the supply chain with the demand chain, is an ideal solution for such organisations," says Pradeep Sen, president and head, global business development, Datamatics. "We also see great potential in the fast growing services segment, which is an area of focus for Datamatics."
"Over the years MegaVisa has developed expertise in sourcing and supply chain execution. Hence selling and implementing supply chain planning tools is only a natural progression for us," says Ajay Mittal, chairman and managing director, MegaVisa Marketing and Solutions. "With a strong partner like Manugistics, we are now in an unparalleled position to help companies to benefit from cost-cutting and improved operational efficiencies across all aspects of their supply chains. We are very upbeat about the success of this initiative and have committed to invest over $1 million over the next few years in sales efforts and implementation team."
The agreements with Datamatics and MegaVisa are part of a regional development programme for Manugistics that has seen the appointment of new value-added resellers across Asia, where it started operations less than two years ago. Commenting on the timing of the company's expansion in the Indian subcontinent, Christensen says: "Manugistics is a highly-focused company that is very serious about ensuring the satisfaction of our existing customers. This approach favours gradual expansion into different international markets and now the time is right to look to India."
Independent research conducted by Nucleus Research shows that 80 per cent of the Manugistics customers who were interviewed enjoyed a positive ROI from Manugistics in an average payback period of just 16 months. Companies reported improvements in inventory reduction, revenue growth, user productivity; shorter order fulfilment cycles and operational cost savings helped them recoup their investment in Manugistics.
