Aravo Launches SIM 10™: Global Supplier Information Management Platform

Cohesive, Comprehensive, Collaborative Platform Offers Self-Service Management of Supplier Information with Pre-Packaged solutions for Sustainability and Risk Management

ISM 2008, St. Louis, MO, May 5, 2008 – Aravo Solutions has unveiled its new ondemand Supplier Information Management (SIM) platform Aravo SIM 10™. The platform was designed and built to assist global enterprises in gaining control over supply chain management challenges while minimizing the risks of inefficiencies and unanticipated failures in the supply chain. The launch announcement was made today at ISM’s 93rd Annual International Supply Management Conference in St. Louis.

“More stringent regulatory mandates and increased pressures to outsource have significantly increased the challenges global enterprises face in managing supplier information,” said Aravo CEO Tim Albinson. “Enterprises in all industries can improve their bottom lines by replacing the traditional jumble of legacy point-solution supplier information tools with a single, comprehensive platform that provides collaborative functionality and real-time visibility into supply chain processes.”

Developed from Aravo’s market-proven, industry-leading supplier information management platform, Aravo SIM 10™ was designed to address global enterprise requirements for comprehensive functionality, security, reliability and scalability in one integrated, easy-todeploy enterprise solution. Like other enterprise-ready SaaS-based platforms such as Salesforce.com, Aravo SIM 10™ employs a collaborative self-service model that can be quickly deployed around the world to solve the most formidable, costly and risky supply chain challenges.

“The management of supplier information, complex CSR programs, and initiatives is no longer a back-office task operating in the shadows,” said Carolyn Duffy, Executive Director of Insite Compliance Services, a leading-edge compliance management organization. “Daily front-page headlines on product recalls, lead-tainted consumer products and unethical procurement practices have brought supplier information management to the forefront and highlighted the broader role it plays in adding value to companies’ global supply chain.”

Live demonstrations of Aravo SIM 10™ are available this week at the ISM Conference in St. Louis. Participants are invited to visit booth number 118 to experience the benefits of Aravo SIM 10™’s enterprise-ready architecture with prepackaged customer-driven solutions and vertical market modules enabled by the new Aravo platform.

Aravo SIM 10™ Satisfies the Demanding Requirements of Global Enterprises

The newly upgraded product is based on an enterprise-grade SaaS architecture to meet the infrastructure needs of global organizations with complex supply chains. Built on the concept of self-service and automation, it provides easy-to-use, role-based dashboards that pull together disparate pieces of information from diverse areas of the business and aggregate third party and supplier-generated data into a centralized master data repository.

Suppliers self-author their own information and submit it to their enterprise buyer partners through a workflow-based submission and approval process. All supply chain participants, no matter where they are located, have instant 24×7 access to accurate information with whatever level of detail they need to perform their jobs. Both suppliers and buyers can see a full audit history of all changes made to supplier data.

Aravo SIM 10 addresses all critical supplier information management needs and functions of global enterprises, including:

• Supplier Risk and Compliance Management – Aravo SIM 10™ provides a structured framework for supplier risk assessment and scoring to determine the core elements of a supplier’s risk profile. Examples of risk categories include: financial, geographic, labor, code of conduct, availability of labor/materials, and toxics/carbon. Aravo automates the analysis and reporting of supplier risk scores based on these criteria, and delivers contingency-based rules to determine dynamic contingency plans and workflows for corrective actions planning.
• Supplier Data Enrichment as a Service – Aravo SIM 10™ integrates with external data enrichment providers (such as Dunn & Bradstreet and StrikeIron) using batch and realtime, Web-Services interfaces, resulting in continuous data enrichment and validation.
• Vendor Master Management – Aravo SIM 10™ allows global enterprises to centralize the management of supplier information across regions, divisions and departments, providing a single repository for the management, approval and maintenance of supplier information of all types. Aravo SIM 10™ allows enterprises to maintain a single view of the supplier with highly nuanced hierarchy and permissions controls to ensure the supplier record reflects the needs and requirements of all users across the enterprise. Aravo SIM 10 also offers complete integration framework for the automated pushing and pulling of data from multiple internal enterprise systems.
• Sustainability Program Management – Aravo SIM 10™ offers the market’s first commercially available sustainability program management platform with a focus on sustainable supply chains. Pre-packaged solution offerings include supplier/factory audit, carbon assessment, toxic substances compliance and green sourcing/procurement.
• Enterprise Supplier Collaboration – Aravo SIM 10™ provides a single platform from which to manage all communications and collaboration between the supplier, internal stakeholders and external service providers such as auditors. It captures supplier communications such as emails, notes and documents in one place for viewing by all with audit trails and a data repository.
• Flexible Architecture – The global enterprise expansion features of Aravo SIM 10™ support multi-national and multi-business-unit deployments, which typically require the ability to configure the application according to complex organizational corporate hierarchies. SIM 10 handles these complex deployments by enabling the enterprise to control functional areas such as data organization, roles/responsibilities, searching, permissions, security, reporting, business rules, and integration.

Customer-Driven Prepackaged Solutions for Out-of-the-Box Functionality

Aravo SIM 10’s pre-packaged solutions enable companies to rapidly design, launch and maintain projects in areas that are frequently the most complex and costly. Rather than “starting from scratch,” Aravo SIM 10™ allows users to build on pre-packaged solutions for multiple initiative types including (1) Factory Audit, (2) Supplier Risk Assessment, (3) Toxic Substance Management and (4) Supplier Carbon Footprint Discovery. The result is faster implementations that leverage best-practices to ensure minimal risk and maximum v value.

Aravo SIM 10™ also includes targeted pre-configured solutions for three vertical industries: Financial Services, Manufacturing and High-Tech, and Retail / Consumer Packaged Goods. These solutions fulfill industry-specific requirements and deliver best-practice functions on top of the Aravo SIM 10 platform.

About Aravo

The world’s best-run businesses utilize Aravo’s Cloud-based Supplier Lifecycle Management solutions and Supplier Risk Services 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%. Aravo launched the market’s first SIM/SLM solution in 2004 and has been the leading innovator in the space ever since. Customers such as 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, New York, Portland, Monterrey, Mexico and Ahmedabad, India, and is backed by over $50 million in investment from Cisco Systems, Big Sky Partners, and others.