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I2 Next-Generation Transportation Management Solution Allows Companies to Act Locally and Manage Globally

Posted on: Thursday, 11 May 2006, 18:02 CDT

i2 Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq:ITWO) today announced that i2 Next-Generation Transportation Management solutions are now available to enable best-in-class, holistic transportation management across distributed global operations.

"Companies seeking improved responsiveness to inherent supply chain variability and business uncertainty will find the help they need in i2's next-generation transportation management solutions," said i2 CEO Michael McGrath. "Designed to give business users the ability to focus on strategic decision making, the i2 Next-Generation Transportation Management solution offers a development suite for next-generation planning and execution based on a state-of-the-art service-oriented architecture, enabling companies to make system changes at the rate of business innovation and as business process changes."

The Business Challenge

Companies today face numerous transportation challenges. Rising fuel costs, new regulatory mandates, increasingly global operations with higher levels of lead time variability - all making transportation costs a larger percentage of the cost of goods sold. The industry is experiencing severe capacity issues, such as driver and equipment shortages and an imbalance in freight flows driven by global sourcing. Customers have increasing expectations for transportation performance, higher on-time delivery performance, reduced damage-in-transit, flexibility and the ability to adapt to order changes, as well as order and shipment visibility. Add this to an increased need for global inbound and outbound freight visibility and control, and companies are scrambling to find the right solution to quickly address these challenges.

i2 Next-Generation Transportation Management solutions can address some of these critical business issues. i2 solutions can provide:

-- End-to-end transportation transaction management for planning and execution

-- Robust multi-modal, multi-leg shipment optimization for domestic and international movements

-- Best-in-class planning, execution, visibility, documentation/reconciliation, reporting

-- Coordination of multiple carriers, modes and geographies

-- An integrated execution solution including automated tendering, appointment scheduling, event management and freight audit and payment

-- Automated exception resolution workflows and carrier communication

-- Integrated dashboard-driven reporting and analytics

-- Improved customer satisfaction through accurate, updated delivery forecasts and access to real-time status reports

-- Ability to extend workflows, user-interfaces and integrate to multiple internal and external systems by leveraging the i2 Agile Business Process Platform

The complexity of today's global supply chains continues to challenge transportation and distribution operations and the systems that are designed to help solve their day-to-day issues. The most significant contributor to this is the breadth and velocity of variability that is introduced to any number of given points across distributed workflows, and the lack of synchronization across the systems that manage them.

The Next Generation is Now

Leading companies realize that they need an external architecture in order to link transportation, inventory and distribution management. This solution must integrate into the overall enterprise architecture to create a closed-loop management environment. It also must be configurable to the degree that user requirements at the localized operations level are not sacrificed or disrupted as the result of an enterprise-focused system that is inflexible and therefore unusable. In today's marketplace, all of this must be achieved rapidly and cost effectively.

Executives from LG Electronics (LGE), a leader in consumer electronics and mobile communications, recognized the need to streamline its business processes and identified multiple areas of improvement within its transportation and distribution operations. The challenge for LGE was to achieve transparency between market demand variability and distribution planning and execution. To effectively manage this, LGE set out to establish integrated best-practice workflows across the entire transportation and distribution organization, with a first installation in its Korean operations.

"i2 Next-Generation Transportation Management System (TMS) is the only solution today that has the ability to deliver best-in-class supply chain management functionality along with the adaptability to customize workflows and scale across our complex and distributed supply chain network," said Lee Geun An, chief officer of the Management Innovation Team for Hi-Logistics, the logistics division of LGE. "This combination of world-class domain expertise, rich solution functionality, and innovative delivery methodology works to extend the value of i2 Transportation Management solutions both inside and outside of our enterprise and enables highly customizable and configurable user interfaces in an effective and cost-efficient manner."

i2's Next Generation Transportation Management Solutions deliver best-in-class functionality with adaptable deployment capabilities. Combining i2's industry leading TMS with the i2 Business Process Platform, customers can further leverage the strengths of their core information systems in place in order to extend the value of ERP, WMS and OMS functionality into additional areas of the supply chain. The i2 solutions are designed to execute the global strategy, yet have the agility to configure the user interface and workflows at the localized level. With i2 Next-Generation TMS, LGE has been able to realize its supply chain strategy and is positioned to continue to achieve operational efficiency and supply chain innovation.

"With i2 Next-Generation Transportation Management, LGE was able to quickly accomplish integrated workflows between our existing systems infrastructure, including ERP, OMS, WMS and logistics management systems," continued Lee Geun An. "The lead time for the deployment of i2 Next-Generation TMS was 90 percent faster than if similar situations were deployed through traditional development and integration methods."

About i2

i2 helps business leaders make better supply chain decisions. i2's flexible next generation solutions are designed to synchronize demand and supply across ever-changing global business networks. i2's innovative supply chain management tools and services are pervasive in a wide cross-section of industries; 20 of the AMR Research Top 25 Global Supply Chains belong to i2 customers. Learn more at www.i2.com.

i2 Cautionary Language

This press release may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including forward-looking statements regarding i2's Next-Generation SCM solutions, a customer's ability to implement or integrate those solutions successfully and in a timely fashion, receive expected functionality and performance, or achieve benefits attributable to i2 solutions. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those projected. For a discussion of factors which could impact i2's financial results and cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements, please refer to i2's recent filings with the SEC, particularly the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed May 10, 2006 and the Annual Report on Form 10-K filed March 15, 2006. i2 assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this news release.

Source: Business Wire

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