i2 Kunden Essar Steel, Fairchild Semiconductor und Kimberly-Clark mit Ken Sharma Award of Excellence ausgezeichnet

München - 11. November 2009 -i2 Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITWO) und die i2 User Group geben die Verleihung des Ken Sharma Award of Excellence an drei i2 Kunden bekannt. Essar Steel, Fairchild Semiconductor und Kimberly-Clark werden damit für herausragende Leistungen in den Kategorien "Supply Chain Innovation", "Return on Investment" und "Supply Chain Depth and Breadth" gewürdigt. Eine unabhängige Jury aus Analysten von AMR Research kürte die Gewinner. Pressemitteilung im englischen Originaltext: i2 Customers Essar Steel, Fairchild Semiconductor and Kimberly-Clark Win Ken Sharma Award of Excellence Recipients recognized for supply chain innovation, return on investment and depth and breadth i2 Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ITWO) and the i2 User Group today announced Essar Steel, Fairchild Semiconductor and Kimberly-Clark as the global winners of the Ken Sharma Award of Excellence. The annual award, which pays tribute to i2"s late co-founder Ken Sharma and is open to hundreds of i2 customers worldwide, recognizes companies that have made outstanding advancements in supply chain management through deployments of i2 solutions. An independent panel of analysts from AMR Research judged nominees in the categories of supply chain innovation, return on investment, and depth and breadth. Finalists for the global award were named in May 2009 and included Essar Steel NV, Lenovo and Maxim Integrated Products in the Depth and Breadth category, Fairchild Semiconductor, Whirlpool Corporation and Woolworths in the Innovation category, and Incitec Pivot Ltd., Kimberly-Clark and SanDisk Corporation in the Return on Investment category. "In times of economic uncertainty, excellence in supply chain management is critical to a company"s success. Essar Steel, Fairchild Semiconductor and Kimberly-Clark have made improvements to their supply chains that have delivered real value to their companies," said Hiten Varia, executive vice president, Global Customer Operations and chief customer officer, i2. "We offer our congratulations to this year"s winners. Their commitment to driving value through their supply chains is a fitting tribute to Ken Sharma"s legacy." "A focus on supply chain innovation and operations can help companies better manage the increasing complexity, volatile demand and shrinking global markets of today"s business environment. The winners of this year"s Ken Sharma Award have a good grasp of what it takes to compete in this environment, using supply chain management to help give them a competitive advantage," said Noha Tohamy, research director at AMR Research. "We were impressed by the applicants and offer them our congratulations." Essar Steel Recognized for Supply Chain Depth and Breadth One of the world"s fastest-growing global steel companies, Essar Steel NV has tripled its capacity in the last two years and has a goal of becoming one of the top 10 global steel producers by 2015. To do this, the company needed world-class supply chain management capabilities to grow profitability, strengthen customer relationships, reduce inventories and increase throughput. Working with i2, Essar Steel created a new supply chain management organization reporting directly to the CEO. As a driving force for change, recognition of common objectives, and adoption of new practices across the company, the new organization galvanized the company"s focus on cross-functional synergies as a key competitive differentiator. Since implementing a variety of i2 solutions to address advanced order planning and sales and operations planning, Essar Steel has increased forecast accuracy for domestic contract customers by nearly 30 percent. The company has reduced work-in-process inventory and order leads times, in addition to reducing response time for customer inquiries from two to three hours to six seconds. Fairchild Semiconductor Recognized for Supply Chain Innovation Fairchild Semiconductor is a global leader in delivering energy-efficient power analog and power discrete solutions for consumer, communications, industrial, mobile, computing and automotive systems. Fairchild"s overall business driver was to achieve "perfect order delivery performance." With i2 solutions implemented across their entire supply chain, Fairchild has been able to improve asset utilization and capital deployment, reduce inventories and associated costs, improve gross margins, increase market share and better align its systems with its overall business model. Since working with i2, Fairchild is able to address its entire product portfolio and business rules within one supply chain planning engine. Additionally, Fairchild is able to optimize capacities, inventories and customer commitments across all product lines while using one set of standard business rules.The company estimates it will save $20 million during the next four years based on published industry research. Fairchild has also improved its perfect order rate by two full percentage points. Kimberly-Clark Recognized for Supply Chain Return on Investment In an effort to build competitive strength, Kimberly-Clark, a leading global health and hygiene company, sought to implement a new transportation management system (TMS) along with a business process redesign to reduce its transportation spend. With operations heavily focused in North America and Europe, the company gathered business leaders from those regions to identify synergies that would support more strategic operations and enable cost reductions. Using those findings, i2 worked with Kimberly-Clark to implement a common transportation tool and business processes. By implementing several i2 transportation solutions, and by leveraging optimization capabilities to achieve rate reductions prior to implementation, Kimberly-Clark has achieved US$8.77 million in savings in North America at the time of its Ken Sharma Award application. During that same time frame, the company also saved US$1.6 million as a result of its implementation in Europe. i2 Technologies Mette Krogh Tandergaardsvej 3 8340 Malling +4520827825 www.i2.com Pressekontakt: Lucy Turpin Communications Fuchs-Laine Birgit Prinzregentenstraße 79 81675 München i2@lucyturpin.com + 49 89 417761-13 http://www.lucyturpin.com