Buyer Analytics

A T Kearney Procurement Solutions, and UGS Corp, announced the Asian Sourcing Network, an initiative to enable manufacturers to electronically source machine parts from low-cost countries. The companies are teaming with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading information technology and engineering services organisation, to open the first ASN centre in Coimbatore, India.

Says Dr. Ravi Gopinath, vice president, engineering and industrial services, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, "This initiative by A T Kearney Procurement Solutions, UGS and TCS will enable the global manufacturing industry to achieve desegregation of their value chain and restructure their supply chain to include global suppliers based on the selection criteria of an optimum combination of capability and cost. TCS' extensive understanding of the manufacturing industry puts it in a unique position to make this initiative a big success. TCS is committed to enhance the competitiveness of the manufacturing and SME sector in low-cost countries through supply network management and guiding continuous improvement cycles."

ASN focuses on supplier identification, supplier assessment, and sourcing negotiations as well as providing for critical process and supplier management requirements, such as:

• Supplier participation through "global" collaboration
  
• Supply market transparency in low-cost countries
  
• In-country engineering services support
  
• Technical capabilities mapped to support requirements-driven sourcing analytics
  
• Version control and tracking of all inter-company documents and communications
  
• Joint project management and issue tracking
  
• Configurable workflows and performance tracking

You can read more about ASN at the UGS web site. Here is the link: http://www.ugs.com/about_us/press/press.shtml?id=4524