New Capabilities Include Product-Level Risk Metrics, Integration with the Corruption Perception Index, and Deeper Support for Business Criticality Indexes
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, November 22, 2010 – Aravo, the leading provider of on-demand Supplier Information Management (SIM) software and services for Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM), today announced the latest release of its award winning solution. Continuing to raise the bar for SLM offerings, this release provides sourcing, procurement and risk management executives with increased capabilities to effectively identify, quantify and mitigate supply chain risk. New tools and features include support for critical product-level risk metrics, independent third party data integration, and flexible business critically indexes.
Given the volatile economic climate, companies have become increasingly dependent on global suppliers in efforts to cut costs and focus on core competencies. This, however, exposes global enterprises to increased risk tied to supply chain disruptions. Recent industry studies, such as “The New Weakest Link in Your Supply Chain,” published by the Association of Financial Professionals in early November, highlights the need for companies to manage suppliers on a much more proactive, holistic basis. The study emphasizes that a supplier’s operational health, finances, and the quality of its performance are linked. Aravo’s current solution release provides the tools to achieve these goals.
“Long-gone are the days when companies could simply rely on credit reports or third party financial scores as their sole supplier risk management approach,” says Tim Albinson, Aravo CEO. “As the original pioneer in the SIM space, Aravo has seen the growth in complexity of supplier risk, and has led the industry in providing our customers with the solutions and services to help them select, monitor and manage the variables that drive supply chain failure. This latest release of our solution suite enables companies to implement a comprehensive supplier risk management program that combines industry best practices with automated processes and broad integration with risk data sources.”
Key to supplier risk management for products companies is the ability to monitor supplier performance and the associated risk at the product level. Understanding product risk from the brand down to the part level is critical in avoiding product quality and customer delivery failures. To address this need, Aravo’s new release delivers the industry’s first SIM solution with part-level risk visibility. Using Aravo, customers can now measure and view a supplier risk index for critical parts across their supply chain.
Reflecting the industry need for true multidimensional risk criteria, Aravo has long supported the aggregation of a variety of risk factors into its overall Aravo Supplier Risk Scores. With this release, Aravo has added enhanced integration to additional third party data including:
Many Aravo customers are also moving towards managing suppliers at multiple levels across business units and geographies. As a result, they must organize and access information according to these internal business relationships. With this release, Aravo has enhanced its supplier business relationship management capabilities by adding hierarchical search criteria to its business process wizard. As a result, users can quickly identify the relationships they must manage based on geography, commodity, etc., and view risk scores of all associated supplier business relationships.
Supply risk managers must also consider the importance, or criticality, of a supplier to the enterprise. Aravo added a Business Criticality Index (BCI) to reflect this need in an earlier release, and has now combined the BCI with Business Relationships to deliver complete flexibility in managing supplier relationships based upon each company’s unique combination of risk, relationship and criticality criteria.
Lastly, Aravo has extended the configurability of its credentials management capabilities in its industry leading Aravo Credentials & Compliance solution to allow users to easily automate the tracking and instant notification of the expiration of all certifications, from insurance documents to SAS70 audits to regulatory approvals.
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.
