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Aravo Continues to Lead Supplier Lifecycle Management Market with Latest Solution Release

Given the volatile economic climate, companies have become increasingly dependent on global suppliers in efforts to cut costs and focus on core competencies. This, however, exposes global enterprises to increased risk tied to supply chain disruptions. Recent industry studies, such as "The New Weakest Link in Your Supply Chain," published by the Association of Financial Professionals in early November, highlights the need for companies to manage suppliers on a much more proactive, holistic basis. The study emphasizes that a supplier's operational health, finances, and the quality of its performance are linked. Aravo's current solution release provides the tools to achieve these goals.

"Long-gone are the days when companies could simply rely on credit reports or 3^rd party financial scores as their sole supplier risk management approach," says Tim Albinson, Aravo CEO. "As the original pioneer in the SIM space, Aravo has seen the growth in complexity of supplier risk, and has led the industry in providing our customers with the solutions and services to help them select, monitor and manage the variables that drive supply chain failure. This latest release of our solution suite enables companies to implement a comprehensive supplier risk management program that combines industry best practices with automated processes and broad integration with risk data sources."

Key to supplier risk management for products companies is the ability to monitor supplier performance and the associated risk at the product level. Understanding product risk from the brand down to the part level is critical in avoiding product quality and customer delivery failures. To address this need, Aravo's new release delivers the industry's first SIM solution with part-level risk visibility. Using Aravo, customers can now measure and view a supplier risk index for critical parts across their supply chain.

Reflecting the industry need for true multidimensional risk criteria, Aravo has long supported the aggregation of a variety of risk factors into its overall Aravo Supplier Risk Scores. With this release, Aravo has added enhanced integration to additional third-party data including:

• Analysis of supplier geographical location against the Corruption Perception Index published by Transparency International, which ranks countries of the world according to the degree to which corruption is perceived to existing among public officials and politicians.
• Eight new Bridger Insight Watchlists, including Commodity Futures Trading Commission Sanctions, UK FSA, Foreign Agents Registrations, Ireland Financial Regulator Unauthorized Firms, Japan FSA, Japan MOF Sanctions, Japan METI-WMD Proliferators, and the People's Bank of China regulatory monitoring.

Many Aravo customers are also moving towards managing suppliers at multiple levels across business units and geographies. As a result, they must organize and access information according to these internal business relationships. With this release, Aravo has enhanced its supplier business relationship management capabilities by adding hierarchical search criteria to its business process wizard. As a result, users can quickly identify the relationships they must manage based on geography, commodity, etc., and view risk scores of all associated supplier business relationships.

Supply risk managers must also consider the importance, or criticality, of a supplier to the enterprise. Aravo added a Business Criticality Index (BCI) to reflect this need in an earlier release, and has now combined the BCI with Business Relationships to deliver complete flexibility in managing supplier relationships based upon each company's unique combination of risk, relationship and criticality criteria.

Lastly, Aravo has extended the configurability of its credentials management capabilities in its industry leading Aravo Credentials & Compliance solution to allow users to easily automate the tracking and instant notification of the expiration of all certifications, from insurance documents to SAS70 audits to regulatory approvals.

About Aravo

The world's best-run businesses utilize Aravo's SaaS Supplier Information Management platform to reduce the cost of managing suppliers by up to 72% and to transform their supplier on-boarding, compliance, enablement, and risk management challenges into competitive advantage. General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Accenture, and Deutsche Bank rely on Aravo to manage information and processes for over 1.5 million global suppliers. Aravo is based in San Francisco, with offices in Chicago, New York, and Ahmedabad, India, and is backed by over $50 million in investment from Cisco Systems, Big Sky Partners, and the Charles Schwab family. For more information regarding Aravo's award-winning solutions please visit http://www.aravo.com or view our blogs at http://www.2sustain.com and http://atrisk.net.

Public Relations:
JustSmart Communications
Marlena Fernandez, 303-408-3155
marlena@justsmartcommunications.com