AUTOMOTIVE

"In these challenging economic times, manufacturers are turning increasingly to integration and business insight solutions to help protect margins, more closely manage inventory and capacity, and gain market share by better meeting fast-changing customer demands," said Paul Albright, chief marketing officer at Informatica. "As they do so, they are looking for a solid economic payback on investment. Informatica is pleased to be helping so many of the world's leading manufacturing firms realize measurable and substantial returns on their data integration and business intelligence investments." Added Albright, "It's also important to note that many of these manufacturers will soon begin moving to meet retailer and government demands for Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, compliance. Data integration and business intelligence solutions will be critical to leveraging the anticipated flood of RFID information for unprecedented real-time visibility into global supply chain and manufacturing operations." Global manufacturers are currently using the Informatica platform for tasks such as analyzing procurement by supplier, commodity and cost center; consolidating inventory information across multiple plants; analyzing profitability across brands and products; monitoring forecasted versus actual sales; and analyzing CRM data. Informatica software is also being used to consolidate and simplify IT environments in the wake of mergers and acquisitions. "Brunswick is using Informatica's data integration and business intelligence software for immediate visibility into warranty and quality issues and their root causes across our extended supply chain," said Chris Lemnah, director of strategic sourcing at Brunswick Corporation, a leading manufacturer of recreational products. "The resulting improvements in product quality will translate directly to increased customer satisfaction, significantly reduced warranty expenditures, and improved profit margins." Informatica manufacturing customers that have recently won the prestigious TDWI Best Practices Award include Toyota (2003), HP (2002), Ultramar Diamond Shamrock/Valero (2000), 3Com (1999) and GTE Airfone (1998). Moreover, in 2003, Motorola won CMP Media's Realware Award for Best Strategic Business Performance Management Application for its use of Informatica data integration and business intelligence software. Other major Informatica manufacturing customers include Bethlehem Steel, Boeing, Caterpillar, GE Power Systems, Lockheed Martin and Siemens Energy. "When Dannon implemented SAP for planning, finance, purchasing and forecasting, we were faced with having to synchronize certain key legacy applications with the new environment," said Greg Northrup, information services director at Dannon Company, Inc., a leading national producer of yogurt products. "The Informatica data integration platform has not only enabled near real-time integration of legacy data with the new SAP system, but has also helped us to standardized on the same data integration best practices for other enterprise projects, from data warehousing to additional system and application integration projects."