Aravo Leads Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) Innovation with Summer 2012 Product Release

Aravo Enterprise^TM Delivers Next Generation Supplier Risk Management, Ad Hoc Reporting and Enterprise MDM Integration

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aravo Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) and B2B information and collaboration solutions, today announced the Summer 2012 release of its award-winning Aravo Enterprise^TM SLM solution suite. Aravo’s latest product release again leads the market in innovation with next-generation enhancements to supplier risk management, ad-hoc reporting and enterprise MDM integration capabilities. Aravo customers will now benefit from increased flexibility in risk model creation to further reduce their exposure to supply chain failures; broader and deeper ad-hoc reporting to enable all users to focus on timely, actionable decision support information; and web-service additions to its robust industry-standard enterprise MDM integration framework to reduce supplier management costs while optimizing data quality and timeliness across all downstream systems.

“Managing supplier relationships today has gone from identifying and buying goods and services based on negotiated price, to the strategic ability of recognizing “win-win”

Today’s continuing increase in the complexity of global supply chains is driven by often competing factors such as the need to decrease costs through low cost country sourcing while balancing this with the imperative to reduce brand, reputation and product quality risk. Managing this complexity requires a deep understanding of, and visibility into, supplier relationships and their impact on the enterprise. A recent Aberdeen Group report observes, “Managing supplier relationships today has gone from identifying and buying goods and services based on negotiated price, to the strategic ability of recognizing “win-win” opportunities for both buyer and supplier through enhanced supplier management activities.” (The Year of the Supplier: Perspectives in Supplier Management, The Aberdeen Group.)

“The trend toward increased enforcement of regulatory compliance programs – including Conflict Minerals, FCPA and C-TPAT - require the deployment of an enterprise caliber, purpose-built solution to monitor, measure and prove due diligence initiatives. Companies can no longer rely on manual, paper-based processes and the physical security of filing cabinets to protect themselves and their businesses from risk within their supply and demand chains. Aravo’s products are uniquely designed to help our customers standardize and automate these complex processes and solve these mission critical business challenges,” said David Rusher, Vice President of Product Strategy & Services at Aravo. “With our Summer 2012 product release, we are once again delivering innovation in ways that companies can optimize supplier relationships to drive down costs, ensure global regulatory compliance, and reduce supply chain risk.”

Aravo Summer 2012 Release Highlights

Unrivaled Supplier Risk Management

Aravo’s Supplier Risk Management solution has long offered the industry’s most robust capability to build and track granular risk and performance metrics across the enterprise. Combining inputs from both internal and external sources, Aravo has become the single source of truth for supply chain risk visibility and mitigation for leading companies across industries.

Understanding that companies often create their own proprietary and complex risk models using a variety of internal tools, Aravo’s latest product release adds the ability to import these custom calculation models directly into the Aravo Risk Management framework to be leveraged throughout the collection, assessment and management of supplier risk. The result is a comprehensive risk management environment that not only reduces enterprise exposure, but provides competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Flexible Ad-Hoc Reporting

The Hackett Group recently observed that “Most procurement leaders intuitively know that supply analytics are critical to their organization’s ability to provide higher value services.” (World-Class Supply Analytics and Information Management, by Pierre Mitchell & Steven Wright, The Hackett Group)

Aravo knows that to deliver these necessary, actionable business analytics requires more than just static reports and dashboards. Accordingly, Aravo’s Summer 2012 release takes supplier management reporting to the next level with new powerful, flexible and user-friendly ad-hoc reporting. With Aravo Ad-Hoc Reporting, business users can now craft their own unique inquiries to provide insights on the operational as well as strategic performance of their supply base, and can choose to share these reports with anyone in the enterprise. The result is fast access to actionable supplier analytics that drive down costs and take advantage of real-time opportunities.

Enterprise MDM Integration

Aravo believes that external, unstructured data on suppliers must be integrated with internal, structured master data sources in order to deliver effective business insights. This type of integration goes beyond the typical bi-directional data flow and into the arena of complex process integration. As an end-to-end process is executed, it is critical that participating systems have clean hand-offs and appropriate context in order to maintain complex organizational policies.

In this product release Aravo has added the ability to initiate processes based upon web-service events triggered by 3^rd party systems, as well as business process controls that can suspend a process while passing control to a 3^rd party system in real-time, and resume processing through a web-service notification. The result is deep MDM integration of both internal and external data sources for improved data accuracy and timeliness.

Other Key Enhancements

• Complex workflow automation enhancements that strengthen task assignment and communication, as well as added support for synchronous workflow management.
• Enterprise-class security enhancements that manage some of the most complex and confidential supplier lifecycle processes for many of the world’s largest global procurement organizations. Enhancements include real-time synchronization with centralized user credential management systems, configurable encryption of supplier data at-rest, and custom user profiles to provide granular control over access and visibility to supplier information.

“For procurement to move beyond pushing paper and doing deals, it has to radically improve its supply information management capabilities. This includes supply data management as well as the increasingly external unstructured data on suppliers and markets that must be integrated with internal, structured master-data sources,” said Pierre Mitchell, Senior Research Director at The Hackett Group.

About Aravo

The world's best-run businesses utilize Aravo's Cloud-based Supplier Lifecycle Management and business social network solutions to find and manage trading partner relationships, reduce supply chain risk, ensure global regulatory compliance and lower the cost of managing suppliers by up to 72%. Customers like General Electric, Accenture, and Boston University rely on Aravo to manage information and processes for over 2 million global suppliers. Aravo is based in San Francisco, with offices in Chicago, Dallas, Portland, Monterrey, Mexico and Ahmedabad, India, and is backed by over $50 million in investment from Cisco Systems, Big Sky Partners, and others. For more information regarding Aravo's award-winning solutions please visit our websites http://www.aravo.com and http://aravoassure.com or view our blogs at http://www.2sustain.com and http://atrisk.net.