Wavin Selects Blue Martini

"Blue Martini provides us with breakthrough technology that, in turn, will provide a break-through level of service for our customers and a breakthrough level of operational efficiency through reduced costs," said Gert-Jan Maasdam, Director of E-Business, Wavin. "This initiative is designed to establish a clear competitive advantage for Wavin," he added.

Wavin, named for the first two syllables of water and vinyl, is deploying Blue Martini applications for a centrally-managed e-business initiative. This initiative includes powering its main corporate site, local language and currency sites across 24 countries, an extensive, multi-lingual e-catalog and an online marketplace for both internal and external transactions.

Packaged Blue Martini integration capabilities enable these customer and partner-facing applications to leverage information from back office systems including SAP, Baan, Concorde, Axapta, BPCS and two internally-developed ERP systems. In addition to Blue Martini applications, the Wavin site also incorporates Lotus™ Notes for e-catalog content and IBM™ MQ Series for e-marketplace messaging protocol, both of which are also integrated with Blue Martini applications.

Wavin's top priority was to become easier to do business with for both customers and partners. With Blue Martini account management capabilities, Wavin's customers can open accounts that not only show account activity, order status, and payment history but also automatically calculate personalized pricing based on customer-specific contract information downloaded from one of the integrated ERP systems. In addition, suppliers, distributors, and customers will also establish inventory minimum/maximum levels and trigger an automatic replenishment process when stock falls below established levels.

Wavin anticipates that its Blue Martini solution will improve product forecasting, enable responsive service, reduce shelf stock, and help Wavin deliver on its "Just In Time" fulfillment policy. The Wavin online catalog contains over 40,000 products, including both Wavin's 17,500 globally manufactured products, and also each regional market's locally manufactured products as well as a selection of third-party items. The company expects the reduction in manual content management and catalog printing costs from using Blue Martini applications to deliver significant savings.

"Our manufacturing and distribution customers continue to achieve quantifiable reductions in the cost to serve customers, " said Monte Zweben, chairman and CEO, Blue Martini Software. "From high tech manufacturers like Lanier reducing the time, energy and costs associated with managing inventory, maintenance and billing, to distributors like Oncology Therapeutics Network reducing manual service costs by 90%, companies are leveraging Blue Martini applications to get more out of their existing back-office investments. Wavin benefits from our ongoing investment in technology development and from our years of manufacturing industry expertise to deliver exceptional sales and service to the company's own customers and partners."