In today's economy the battlefield is shifting from individual company performance to what we call Supply Chain Management. Supply Chain Mgmt. refers to the extended supply chain's activities and the various elements in the chain such as forecasting, ongoing demand management, production, assembly, shipping & distribution, procurement (raw materials & finished goods). Supply Chain Mgmt. crosses company boundaries since it includes basic materials, components, sub-assemblies and finished products, and distribution through various channels to the end customer. The challenge is to inter-connect all trading partners and establish new collaborative processes that support corporate objectives for market share and supply chain cost reduction. It allows suppliers to be immediately notified of and respond to events in the purchasing and planning process, like receipt of Purchase Orders, Order Amendments, creating Order Acceptances, creating Inspection Calls, Advanced Shipping Notifications, viewing Goods Receipt Notes, Inspection Reports, creating Invoices and viewing Payment statuses, its cutting edge technology enables frictionless and secure communication and management of information related with the flow of material from it's point of origin to the point of supply, over multiple and diverse application programs, networks and systems, covering real time event handling throughout the entire supply chain. The software application captures, refines, and expedites the entire purchasing cycle. It incorporates the best practices in procurement today, allowing customers to rapidly improve and easily monitor all their purchasing activities, while achieving immediate and ongoing return on their investment. The Request for Quotation process where Suppliers collaborate online, submit their quotations and negotiate is suitable for low to high volume, technically complex products and for which switching costs are high or where relationship matters. This tool lends itself very well for design engineered, non-standard parts.Shipment ManagerGives the Buyers and Suppliers the real-time status of ordered or vendor managed inventory.Inventory ControllerIt ensures a transparent, real time inventory profile, cutting through the entire cross section of a multi-tier supply chain displaying where direct and indirect material is located in the supply chainIntegration with Backend Enterprise ApplicationsSeamless data transmission and receipt allowing web-enablement and leveraging existing investments in legacy business applications via API's and XML.Features:Open flexible Architecture: An open, flexible 3-tier architecture for scalability and robustness to handle unlimited users and transactions.3-tier Operational Hierarchy: Controlling functions at Purchasing Organization level, while day-to-day operations are handled at the Sourcing Manager & Purchasing Group levelIntegration with Existing Business Applications: It integrates with back-end Enterprise Applications for seamless data transmission and receipt.Supplier Management: The Buyer manages his existing Suppliers and can link up to the global database of Suppliers to discover new sources of supply.Drawing Collaboration: Since in many cases, technically complex products have to be sourced where drawings and specification documents are an integral part of the RFQ, the framework has the facility to share drawings and data sheets with complete online discussion facilityReporting and Analysis: The Buyer can generate multi-dimensional reports using Parts, Purchasing Groups, Suppliers, Time lines, etc as baselines to help him analyze his spend and act as Decision Support Reports.