Partner Collaboration and Management

As true today as in the old economy, companies must search for innovative ways to streamline their manufacturing operations.

From just-in-time and statistical quality control to continuous improvement and lean manufacturing, companies are building sustainable world-class manufacturing organizations. Most are looking to facilitate customer orders on time, attract new customers, create loyalty, build a framework for cost reduction and control, reduce engineering changes, and avoid committing inventory until the product is sold.

It’s said that today’s market leaders must posses several key skills that separate them from their peers and provide a new realm of e-business innovation.

Collaboration is a mutually beneficial and well-designed relationship between two or more individuals or organizations that helps achieve common goals. xCost is our collaborative web-based vendor relationship management tool between third-party manufacturing companies and your internal business units. xCost provides a faster time to market by providing collaboration tools that allow your suppliers and discrete manufacturers to collaborate early on and during the product lifecycle.

Agility is grace and fluidity of movement. In business, an agile enterprise is a fast-moving, adaptable, robust business capable of rapid adaptation in response to unexpected and unpredicted changes, events, market opportunities, and customer requirements. xCost delivers agility through a collaborative simple-to-use interface with robust security management and fast deployment to your manufacturing partners.

Visibility is the act of seeing or the ability to foresee. In business, visibility is measured by the level of predictability in financial data about a company, especially its costs, revenues, and earnings. When the numbers are easy to predict, visibility is said to be high. xCost provides unparalleled visibility into your manufacturing environment, allowing secure data interchange among engineering, procurement, and sales to all discrete manufacturing partnerships.

Quality is a degree of excellence and an essential element in its approach and philosophy. Quality underpins a company’s product, encompassing the core principles of assurance, reliability, independence, customer focus, and continuous improvement. xCost is built on a foundation of quality and process improvement.

Several key product benefits include:

OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES

Increase market share by reducing time to market with closer integration to your supply chain,
procurement, and discrete manufacturing.
Lower procurement cost dollars by providing visibility of multiple plants and manufacturing sites,
throughout the supply chain, to determine best-cost scenario.
Promote economies of scale commodity purchasing to leverage your relationship with your
manufacturers and continue to drive unknown cost out of the manufacturing operation.
Enable your organization to compete more efficiently on a global scale by matching best-manufacturing
scenarios with your business and customer needs.
Automated flow of quoted manufacturing costs into your existing ERP system to automatically set
pricing for purchase orders.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT COLLABORATION PROVIDES
An integrated process that delivers rapid production ramp-up and market positioning.
Ability to work in global virtual teams.
Early visibility to acquire material and plant space, resulting in faster transfer to production times.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Easy Internet data exchange that allows costing and bill-of-material collaboration to happen in
minutes instead of days.
Efficient Internet collaboration and information sharing among knowledge workers, which dramatically
reduces information lag time and encourages focus on issues that drive forward business and
customer value.

Click here for xCost Product Features

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