USA: Manugistics Wins K-Swiss Supply Chain Deal

K-Swiss, Inc (Nasdaq: KSWS - news), the athletic footwear and branded apparel company, has chosen Manugistics' eBusiness solutions to improve its asset utilization, it was announced at Manugistics' enVISION2000 conference today."K-Swiss joins a growing roster of leading apparel, footwear and textiles (AFT) clients turning to Manugistics for competitive advantage," said Greg Owens, Manugistics' president and CEO. "Manugistics' intelligent eBusiness solutions are designed to manage the complex challenges of the AFT industry, helping companies increase velocity, improve visibility and potentially decrease costs."Manugistics NetWORKS will simultaneously balance materials, capacity, inventory, transportation and distribution constraints across K-Swiss' global supplier network of independent contractors to produce a more effective manufacturing plan. Additionally, NetWORKS will enable K-Swiss to more accurately predict customer demand by using life-cycle management, market events and retail point-of-sale data."After a very rigorous selection process involving best-of-breed supply chain providers, we concluded that Manugistics was the best choice," said Steven Nichols, CEO of K-Swiss, Inc. Edward Flora, vice president of operations at K-Swiss, continued: "Manugistics will help enable us to execute proactive planning solutions and exception management rather than searching for and reacting to problems. Their constraint-based optimization engines are key to realizing our global competitiveness. Additionally, we will become better partners with our contracted factories, and provide more timely and reliable information to our third-party suppliers."