Growing with an excellent team

With its new brand image, clear market positioning and a restructured, more precise and refined portfolio of products and services, inet is geared up for further growth. It has a goal which is both ambitious and realistic: for inet to be one of the top five global TMS providers within five years.

10/14/2009 inet compact spoke to CEO Oswald Werle and managing director Wolfgang Erhart about the company’s ongoing development:

>>> THERE HAS BEEN A VISIBLE CHANGE IN INET. WHAT ARE THE REASONS FOR THIS?
Oswald Werle: Our new brand image reflects the inet of today and the future: we are a high-performance team scaling new heights all the time to offer our customers real competitive advantages in the many and varied facets of transportation management. Our work here is ongoing and we combine clear vision with a will to foster the individual strengths and to release the creativity of the many gifted inet staff. We are very proud of our new brand image which truly illustrates the capability, flexibility and excellence of today’s inet staff as well as the market advantage of inet TMS (Transportation Management System). This synchronization of performance and brand image was long overdue, given that the organization and its staff have continued to develop at a very high level for just under ten years now. Our outward image needed to reflect this.

>>> INET TMS CLEARLY TRIPS EASILY OFF YOUR TONGUE DESPITE THE NEW NAME. WHY THE CHANGE?
Oswald Werle (laughing): You’re right. In the management team we spent just under a year thinking so intensively about inet TMS that, with the customers, I really had to force myself to remember “logistics server”.

Wolfgang Erhart: … it was probably doubly hard for you because our customers have always known our software as “inet”. And this is one of the pragmatic reasons for the new name. There were also a great many other reasons which came out over the course of an intensive review of products and services. We in the management team started the review just under a year ago because we wanted to actively manage our continued growth and not to leave its direction to chance. From time to time, we also need to think about our master plan for the software in the light of market developments and adjust it as necessary.

We performed a detailed analysis of our software, which had been developed to closely match the needs of customers and the market as regards diversity of technology and performance. We had aligned it with the benchmarks for the future as defined by leading market observers. It quickly became clear that we are already offering solutions that market analysts such as the Gartner Group, Capgemini Consulting and others are not yet expecting to be available in the TMS market. This gave us broader confirmation of what we had already discovered in our projects for customers. Through the structuring, precision and refinement of our product and service portfolio, we have now made the leading position of our products even more generally apparent. We are confident that, with inet TMS, we are now the market leaders in transportation management systems. We have a competitive advantage of around two years. The new awareness that comes with this requires some form of visible expression, which also involves giving our solution a new product name. For logistics managers, the name inet represents dependability, flexibility and excellence, so we not only made it the prefix of inet TMS but also defined it further as a brand. One that represents high performance and solutions that go beyond standard.

>>> WHAT TARGET ARE YOU PURSUING WITH THE NEW BRAND IMAGE?
Oswald Werle: Our company target is as follows: in five years we want to be one of the top five global providers of TMS solutions. A strong brand and clear positioning are important here. Behind this realistic goal lies confidence in the performance of the organization and the inet team. It is founded on the entire range of inet TMS solutions, which make transportation management simple, transparent and efficient for our customers. In our review we did not only look at our products but also at the TMS market, at our organization and our team. We concluded by highlighting our achievements and our claim: inet represents outstanding performance. This is true for more than just our product development. It is also the case for our high-performance, readily available operations, professional project management and a sales team in which customers have great confidence. Further product and company development will involve the retention of our market advantage and the ongoing consolidation of our capacities and abilities to ensure that we continue our long term growth and achieve our goals.

Our leading solution will be our strongest card in expanding more rapidly than others in the TMS growth market. The establishment of a new level of management has made us stronger and has laid the groundwork for further growth in the organization. To reach our target, we will need to achieve sustainable growth both internationally and in the markets in which we already operate strongly. The conditions for this look favorable, because transportation management is currently undergoing an intense transformation process requiring innovative solutions that can get to grips with the complexity of global transportation networks. inet is in a position to offer not only the right solutions but can also point to satisfied customers who have already managed their transportation logistics to an optimum level with inet TMS and cut down on their long term costs accordingly.

>>> WHAT MAKES THE LEADING POSITION OF INET TMS SO APPARENT?
Wolfgang Erhart: Fundamentally, our leading position rests on the consistent and logical use of internet technologies which, from the outset, have been used to synchronize the cross-company flow of information and material. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) behind inet TMS has proven itself in the market over many years. We do not see it in this form in any other transportation management system. Indeed, market analysts describe the conversion of existing rigid IT architecture into SOA as the most pressing current challenge for manufacturers seeking to offer adequate solutions to the urgent demands of transportation management – namely, how to deal effectively with complex transportation networks by making unified data transparent and available to all supply chain partners and creating continuous process chains for cross-company collaboration. On the one hand, the SOA of inet TMS forms the basis for the system’s high level of flexibility and scalability. On the other hand, it is the optimum architecture for integrating the various systems used by different supply chain partners. Our pioneering work is already paying dividends, since our transportation management system is the long-term leader in terms of functionality, technology, operational stability and market maturity.

>>> IN THE PAST, INET WAS AN SCE PROVIDER. DOES THE SPECTRUM OF PRODUCTS YOU OFFER NOW GET SMALLER DUE TO THE FOCUS ON TMS?
Oswald Werle: Our spectrum of provision is actually expanding. Otherwise, we would not be able to reach our goal of becoming one of the top five global TMS providers. Supply Chain Execution is and remains important to us, because we routinely integrate our solutions into a unified concept to optimize the supply and logistics procedures that are immediately involved in the operational planning, execution and overseeing of procurement, warehousing and supply chains. That is the current definition of SCE – and it has certainly moved on over the last five years.

We have never aspired or claimed to cover all these areas with our own software solution. We include partner solutions that we know to be capable of handling SCE tasks as effectively as inet TMS can. Our professional services cover SCE, identifying for our customers the potential they can realize through the use of excellent SCE. The fact is that inet TMS plays a central role in any SCE solutions provided by us. This is the only sensible course given that transportation management plays such a central role in logistics. inet TMS is and will remain the integration platform for all supply chain partners and their various IT systems.

Herr Werle, Herr Erhart, many thanks for this interview.