Webcast on supplier collaboration and VMI on October 11th

Karlsruhe, Sept. 13th, 2007. Andreas Muschik, former Supply Chain Operations Manager Europe for Peripherals at Hewlett-Packard, and Dr. Kurt Mannchen, CEO of ICON Supply Chain Management, will present innovative concepts of Supplier Collaboration in an online webcast on October 11th. This new edition of the ICON-SCM Practice Forum will also include a case study on a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) implementation at Hewlett-Packard in Boeblingen, Germany. The following topics will be discussed: • Concepts and different levels of Supplier Collaboration • VMI as Best Practice • Case Study:

VMI Project at Hewlett-Packard Attendees will have the opportunity to actively participate in the webcast by asking questions and sharing their experiences. The webcast will start at 5 pm CET and will take 60 minutes.

Supplier Collaboration gains momentum as enterprises increasingly network with partners to take advantage of globalized markets. At the same time, IT support has become more sophisticated to enable collaboration. By this means, partners in a supply network can now profit from visibility on inventory, proactive management of possible bottlenecks, quick response and reduction of manual effort. ICON has offered software applications for Supplier Collaboration since 1999 being one of the first providers for this kind of solution. In the same year Hewlett-Packard Boeblingen implemented ICON’s Collaboration solution to enable Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) with their suppliers for peripheral products. With VMI suppliers keep the inventories at their customer within predefined and mutually agreed thresholds based on min/ max-range. Suppliers can freely deliver within this indicated range which allows them to optimally plan their production and shipment processes.

Both speakers, Andreas Muschik and Dr. Kurt Mannchen, are renowned experts in the field of Supplier Collaboration. As project sponsor Andreas Muschik was in charge of the successful implementation of the VMI project at HP. After serving as manager in different Supply Chain Management functions at Hewlett-Packard, Andreas Muschik today works as independent management consultant. Dr. Kurt Mannchen is co-founder and CEO of ICON Supply Chain Management. He has contributed to several research activities on Supplier Collaboration and has many years of experience with the implementation of Collaboration projects. About ICON Supply Chain Management ICON is a global solution provider for Supply Chain Management with special expertise in demand fulfillment and demand-driven supply networks. For more than 15 years ICON supports medium-sized and international top companies like Hewlett-Packard, Sanmina-SCI, BMW, VW, Soitec, 3M, Honeywell a.o. in optimizing supply chain processes. ICON is headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, with subsidiaries in San Jose, USA, and Hong Kong.