Today we are officially launching version 2.0 of our Predictable Supply Network. Behind every company is a story of how it learns and evolves with the marketplace. As a company we always believe that the best ideas and needs are expressed by our customers. It is our job to listen, learn and collaborate with people that share our vision and partner in the development of the product.

The seeds of this release were planted more than a year ago when we first introduced our innovative Network approach to supply chain leaders. At every meeting, we had the same exact reaction. “Wow, we never thought of approaching the problem the way you have.” The fundamental value of a collaborative network of inter-operable business processes in an integrate-once and inter-operate with everyone framework was immediately evident.

However, the access and integration of the network into their current business applications and processes had to be automated. This is when you turn humble and let the customers chart your course. Our early partners, who include Catalent, Patheon, Sharp and a number of major pharmaceutical companies we cannot name, told us explicitly what we needed to do. They committed their time and a team to work with us to define and create the next set of capabilities.

The customer requirements were clearly expressed:

• “We need integration into our ERP”
• “We have multiple ERPs so we need to have an harmonization of the information formats for our systems”
• “We want you to handle the mapping of the data to our supply chain partners”
• “We want a solution that can allow us to integrate with all our partners without having to invest in individual integrations with each of our partners”
• “We need to link the information across business processes including ones that are not supported by our ERP”

The commitment from our partners/customers included assigning teams to share information and actively work with us on the solution, as well as engaging in multi-day workshops with the executive team to identify and maximize the value for their business. As we designed the solution we iterated in a tight loop with teams across multiple companies. Our shared belief is that we are leading the industry to a new working model that will mutually benefit all parts of the supply chain.

With this release, we are not only providing the service to the larger marketplace to join in on our transformation of the supply chain platform, but we are also integrated with Catalent, Patheon and Sharp. This enables hundreds of Pharmaceutical and BioTech companies to now join in and seamlessly collaborate on Production Tracking, Material Tracking and Inventory Monitoring. With a single integration into the TraceLink Network these companies can inter-operate with any other company on the TraceLink Network. As part of the TraceLink Network, the integration is on your terms. Whether you want to integrate using SAP IDocs, EDI, XML or CSV, we have the support. Furthermore, you work with us to determine the formats you need and we will add the support.

This is a turning point for the industry and we are very grateful for the tremendous contributions by our partners. This process reinforced the values we operate with as a company.

NoBullWhip!

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In 2003, a few of us founded SupplyScape Corporation (the predecessor to TraceLink, Inc.) with a simple vision. We believed that the next wave of enterprise value generation was in integrating people, processes and information between companies. Our focus and core competency to the industry was to provide the integrative network for supporting the rapid selection and deployment of multi-enterprise applications. Today we express our mission as:

“TraceLink is Creating the Predictable Supply Network by Executing Any Business Process with Any Partner at Any Time.”

This month we announced our strategic partnership with Patheon, Inc. to promote supply optimization in Life Sciences. In our deep collaboration with the executive team at Patheon, we identified a number of immediate value propositions for Multi-Enterprise integration between contract partners and their customers. We have seen these core value propositions validated by every Pharmaceutical and Biotech company we are engaged with on building the Predictable Supply Network.

These value propositions can be classified into 5 areas:

1. Transactional Integration: This is the basic level of integration that allows for business documents representing inter-company transactions to be executed seamlessly. It is always surprising how hard it is to get large and small companies integrated into a common protocol and harmonized data sets to conduct business.
2. Data Synchronization: Beyond transactional documents there is a need to share information about process status, inventory disposition and goods flow between companies. Today teams on both sides are constantly generating reports from one system and sending it to the other company in order for it to be keyed into their system. Cost of labor and inaccuracies impacts execution and planning.
3. Synchronization Frequency: The use of manual processes limits the frequency at which information is exchanged. Monthly snapshots are the norm and weekly are the best one can envision. The ability to automate daily or event based synchronization of information provides both companies an advantage in managing demand and fulfillment. Predictability of supply has an immediate top line effect on revenue as well as a bottom-line effect on inventory costs.
4. Shared Visibility: Too often planners and production managers are looking at separate systems with different versions of the truth. With the TraceLink solution the network synchronizes the harmonized information into shared visibility that is available to teams from both companies. We are able to link and analyze the information and the application is shared between the companies.
5. Ad-hoc Collaboration: Teams need the ability to share documents and notes in order to efficiently execute in a dynamic marketplace. Each team we work with always has a need that cannot be adequately captured through a structured business process. Therefore they need to be able to exchange notes and documents representing instructions, documentation, artwork and many more pieces of information that cannot be categorized a priori.

In order to ease the adoption and maximize the value, we agreed to build an SAP Adapter to integrate SAP implementations with the TraceLink network. Patheon will work collaboratively with us to define and develop the SAP Adapter. This will be of significant value for the industry since SAP is the largest installed base of ERP implementations and the clear leader in the top 50 Pharmaceutical and Biotech companies.

The value propositions represented here are just the tip of the iceberg. In all our collaborations with the industry, we can easily identify more and more business process integrations that will drive higher and higher value. I compare where we are today with where SAP was 30 years ago. The initial value of SAP was to consolidate the information and reporting from a single general ledger. ERP was built from those roots.

The Predictable Supply Network is being built on these five foundational value propositions stemming from our Multi-Enterprise Application.

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