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Kewill extends geographic reach
Archived article dated Monday March 5th 2007
Kewill's acquisition of IPACS e-solutions not only extends its geographic reach to Asia Pacific, but adds a leading edge freight forwarding solution targeted at global retailers.
by Penelope Ody
With global supply chains extending deep into the more remoter corners of Asia providing IT support for these manufacturers when it comes to EDI, ASNs and a raft of other technologies is not always easy. For Kewill, a long-term supplier of EDI solutions, as well as other supply chain technologies, the need to support its customers' suppliers in the Far East had become increasingly obvious over the past 18 months.
“Many of our retail customers are bringing suppliers from the Far East on board for EDI,” says Kewill's chief marketing officer Jacquie Boast, “ and they need local support. The IPACS acquisition allows us to follow the sub - give local support in local languages.”But local support was not the only driver for the acquisition. Over the past two years Kewill has been extending its applications offer in the trade and logistics area acquiring Interchain in November 2005 and CSF last June. Both added new software tools as well as significant of logistics service providers as new customers. A problem with these software tools, however, is that they are region specific. Kewill's European customers may have benefited from such freight forwarding systems as Interchain's Chainware but its US ones still needed other Kewill products to cope with sales tax rather than VAT.
“We could have invested in developing these products to make them global,” says cfo Guy Millward, “but that would have taken a year at least.” Instead, the IPACS purchase bring with it ALS - Advanced Logistics System - a Java-based global freight forwarding application that took three years to develop but one that can cope with the niceties of European, US and far Eastern taxes customer regulations or whatever.
Kewill began selling ALS in Europe and the US six months ago; by then IPACS - with development centres in Singapore and Shanghai - had around 700 customers for the product but all were based in Asia-Pacific. The system is multi-lingual, scalable, on an open platform; Kewill plans to migrate its existing freight forwarding customers using the older Interchain and Kewill products to ALS over time. “Obviously we'll continue to support existing users,” adds Boast, “but ALS will replace systems like Chainware and Alliance in future and provide a global trade solution that can be initiated from anywhere in the world and provide complete visibility and control of goods throughout the export/import process.”
Kewill has paid £1.85million in cash for IPACS with up to £1.55million payable over the next 24 months as deferred consideration subject to reaching performance-related criteria on revenues.
Tagged as: kewill
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