History

ICON-SCM History

ICON-SCM was founded in 1992 at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany by Dr. Michael Keppler and Dr. Kurt Mannchen. Today, ICON-SCM is a premier demand-supply management solution. Many of the world’s top companies, including HP, Foxconn, Sanmina-SCI, and Tellabs, rely upon ICON-SCM.

 

Hewlett-Packard Turns to Supply Chain Experts 

The idea for creating ICON-SCM began with a research contract from Hewlett-Packard in Germany for the evaluation of several market-leading ERP and APS software packages. Specifically, HP wanted to understand which solution was best suited to meet the company’s increasingly challenging set of supply chain planning and execution requirements. HP sought to gain substantial competitive advantage through dynamic demand-supply planning and fulfillment across both in-sourced and outsourced operations.

 

Creating a Competitive Advantage

The research demonstrated that neither the ERP nor APS offerings could provide the required combination of rapid planning, demand-supply matching efficiency, modeling flexibility, and end-to-end integration that HP needed. Drs. Keppler and Mannchen proposed to develop an alternative planning approach – one that would address the ERP and APS gaps in functionality and be fast, powerful, and integrated. 

Six months later the new software, ICON-SCP, was ready. The solution was immediately successful – meeting HP’s expectations and delivering tremendous business value. HP quickly deployed ICON-SCP in a dozen additional locations around the world.     

 

Bringing ICON-SCP and ICON-SCC to Market

In 1998, ICON-SCM bought the rights to ICON-SCP from HP and made it available to the general market. The following year, ICON collaborated with DaimlerChrysler to develop ICON-SCC, one of the first Web-based solutions for multi-tier supply chain monitoring and collaboration. The innovative ICON-SCM solution went on to win three e-logistics awards for DaimlerChrysler. ICON-SCC, fully integrated with ICON-SCP, was soon in use at several major European automobile manufacturers and later in consumer and technology product companies.

 

The Next Generation   

ICON-SCM continues to improve and extend its successful solution. In 2004, a major revision to ICON-SCM was released that offered greater flexibility, more planning efficiency, easier integration, and blazing performance. ICON-SCP now runs 30 times faster than before, accelerating already incredibly fast performance. In 2007, ICON-SCM developed ICON-SLM for inventory liability management.

Today our customers know that ICON-SCM’s performance can support their ever-increasing requirements. It remains the only solution in the industry that aligns multiple constraints across multi-level networks to ship demand earlier with less inventory.

© 2010 ICON-SCM GmbH & Co. KG