Aravo SIM™ Goes Live Globally with GE – 500,000 Suppliers, Six Languages, Ten Countries
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, October 29, 2008 – Aravo Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand Supplier Information Management (SIM) software and services, today announced that GE has launched Aravo SIM™ to power and transform GE’s supplier information management processes across all of its business units worldwide.
Aravo SIM™ is a web-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that allows GE to automate and streamline supplier information-related business processes to increase efficiencies, improve supplier data quality, drive compliance, and reduce costs. Furthermore, Aravo SIM™ offers GE’s suppliers an easy-to-use, self-service interface to author and maintain information required to do business with GE at both the corporate and business-unit levels.
GE manages what is arguably one of the world’s most complex supply chains, conducting business with over 500,000 suppliers across thousands of entities in more than 100 countries. GE sought to control this complexity with a Web-based software solution that was highly configurable and easily adopted by users. The implementation began in March 2008 and is now live globally. The initial implementation phase supports GE’s corporate supplier management organization, and will be rolled out to all GE business units by year end. Additional phases are planned for 2009.
“We evaluated a number of alternatives for managing our suppliers and their information, but Aravo SIM™ was the best commercially-available solution capable of meeting our complex, global needs,” said Gary Reiner, Senior Vice President and CIO of GE. “We are now managing over 500,000 suppliers and their data in Aravo SIM™, and have just gone live in six languages with suppliers around the world. We expect that Aravo SIM™ will deliver significant cost savings, while improving data accuracy, compliance and productivity.”
“Aravo’s SIM™ platform was designed to reduce costs and improve productivity and compliance for global companies like GE that manage relationships with tens or hundreds of thousands of suppliers,” said Aravo CEO Tim Albinson. “Aravo SIM™ has enabled GE to streamline supplier management processes and employ a best practices-based methodology that ensures around-the-clock, global access to accurate, validated and approved supplier information. GE’s suppliers also reap significant benefits because Aravo SIM™ provides them with an intuitive interface to manage ongoing information flows.”
Rapid implementation and ease-of-use are key hallmarks of Aravo SIM™. The platform’s intuitive dashboards, best-practice workflows, and automated task management features enabled GE to quickly achieve their supplier management goals in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Because Aravo SIM™ is deployable out-of-the-box and delivered on a web-based, SaaS platform, complex supplier management projects can be rapidly planned and implemented using only a Web browser. Aravo SIM™ allowed GE to create, configure, and launch a new set of firm-wide supplier enablement and management processes that offer task-level information and visibility to all global users via role-based dashboards and alerts.
“Our sourcing and compliance strategies require our employees to see 500,000 vendors with a common view across hundreds of global systems. Coordination requires strong vendor management discipline, both lean and simple, backed up by a global platform that can lock in the process. Aravo SIM met these requirements extremely well,” said Tom Hattier, manager of GE’s Corporate Initiatives Group – Shared Sourcing Services. “Aravo SIM™ provides GE with a globally accessible application for the management of critical information around our supply base. The service allows us to syndicate the information to our various purchasing, accounts payable, and other systems so that we can have one consolidated view of what’s going on with all of our suppliers.”
“Aravo’s supplier information management platform provides supply management executives with information across all aspects of supply management,” wrote Mickey North Rizza of AMR Research in the Supply Management Market Sizing Report, 2007-2012 (July 22, 2008). “Appealing to value-driven organizations that need supplier information across disparate systems, Aravo fulfills a major organizational need.”
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.
