The LOC Extranet technology is being used to centralize logistics knowledge across organizations, bringing together designers, engineers, production managers, procurement agents, suppliers and contract manufacturers. Here are six examples:

• Inventory Collaboration - Bring together key internal and external personnel for supply planning and to head off costly inventory stock-outs and overstock situations. When a variance is detected, a notification is generated and pushed to all relevant stakeholders, inviting them into the LOC Extranet to resolve the issue. The result is often a new set of inventory values and forecast assumptions that can be automatically published back to various enterprise systems.  
   
• Shipping Collaboration - Use LOC Extranet as a central collaborative workplace for planning and setting shipping strategy; tracking shipments; reporting status and reviewing progress with production managers; and streamlining multi-tiered approval processes and review cycles.  
   
• Supplier Scorecard - Discuss and define the appropriate metrics for evaluating a new supplier's performance. Develop a "scorecard" template embedded in the LOC Extranet that maintains consistency in the criteria used for evaluation. Once data has been collected on a specific supplier, it's rolled up as a reference point for managing supplier performance and negotiating contracts.  
   
• Design Collaboration - Bring together designers, engineers and contract manufacturers to define specs and requirements and collaboratively design an integrated product. LOC Extranet enables a distributed team to come together to deliver a high quality product always to spec, and often ahead of schedule.  
   
• Change-Order Management - Automate and streamline the communication of engineering and production change orders. Since a delay in communicating and implementing change orders can lead to out-of-spec production, the LOC Extranet can bring together the right group to quickly phase the change order into place. And to ensure that appropriate stakeholders are able to see and approve the change order, the LOC Extranet allows them to configure a custom approval process.
   
• RFP/RFQ - Manage dozens of active RFPs across a large community of competing vendors. LOC Extranet provides a central environment for posting specifications and RFP criteria; a level playing field for answering questions and clarifying issues; and the flexibility to provide individual, secure extranets to competing vendors for bringing together their own collaborative groups to complete, submit and track the status of various RFP responses.