By Yuji Nakasu

To this point in The Extended Enterprise we have covered our customers' success in Responsiveness, Lean Manufacturing and Global Manufacturing.

These are important, sweeping tends in our industry and we are excited that our glovia.com software is so well suited for manufacturers pursuing aggressive, competitive strategies in these areas. This time, we are taking a look at a central part of our platform that powers our capabilities in these three areas and allows our customers to save time, increase efficiencies, cut costs, boost revenues, and improve service: Collaboration & Integration.

As perhaps most of you now know, many manufacturers have already made significant investments to streamline their internal processes and squeeze costs from their operations. To realize further improvements and to continue to be prepared for new business realities they need to invest in solutions that help them integrate with their customers and trading partners to share information seamlessly in real-time and to automate critical processes.

The enterprises that have remained at the top of their industries and demonstrated increasing success despite economic downturns and greater competition have been those that embraced the Internet to reduce the time and money it takes to manage the intricate flow of information within their four walls between engineering, manufacturing, and financial departments and beyond to their extended supply chain, including trading partners and customers.

Collaboration & Integration is technology at its finest. For an investment that routinely delivers an ROI in less than twelve months, businesses can slash supply chain costs and transaction times, increase order volumes without increasing overhead, automate processes, and improve information accuracy and visibility wherever one part of your company interacts with customers or partners.

Included in this issue is a white paper on our Interstage Application Server, a feature article on Collaboration & Integration, a Glovia Solution Highlight, a case study on Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe Limited (FTEL) and their excellent success with Interstage, and an informative article from Fujitsu Consulting on dealing with legacy systems.

You can also find out more on Collaboration & Integration and a lot of other related topics including Lean Manufacturing at our annual User Group Conference, this year in Orlando, Florida from May 23-27. Please see the User Group section of this newsletter for more information.

We have our fullest agenda ever and already one of the largest registrations ever. I look forward to catching up with you there and I am especially excited to view the user presentations. Some of our customers will be coming to share stories of their successes and best practices, many of which revolve around Collaboration & Integration benefits. Do not miss out on this opportunity to acquire the expertise of your peers and all of the Glovia professionals who will be on hand in Florida.

I look forward to seeing you shortly.

Sincerely,

Yuji Nakasu
President and CEO
Glovia International, Inc.