Exostar has announced it has enhanced its secure supply chain management collaboration suite. The changes include functional and architectural upgrades to help companies and their suppliers move to more effective digital business models.

Several organizations in highly-regulated industries recently have chosen the Exostar Digital Platform. These include the UK-headquartered world’s leading manufacturer of ejection seats, an Australian-based global manufacturer of defense and commercial ships, and a US-based, multi-billion dollar global provider of engineered services and products to the aerospace, defense, and energy industries.

Exostar’s cloud-based solutions help companies collaborate securely with their partners.

Organizations can use Exostar’s Digital Platform to seamlessly engage with their global, multitier supply chains. It enables collaboration at every stage of the supplier lifecycle: qualification and onboarding, sourcing and procurement, order management, and performance/compliance assessment. The services within the Digital Platform can be leveraged as stand-alone or seamlessly integrated with an organization’s legacy systems that handle supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, and manufacturing resource planning.

“Companies that rely on labor-intensive processes tied to end-of-life legacy systems are competing with one hand tied behind their backs,” said Kevin VanLowe, Exostar’s Director of Supply Chain Solutions. “Our Digital Platform paves the way to rapid performance improvement and support for digital business imperatives. Our customers can now opt for a modular path to securing and digitizing their entire supply chain, without taking on expensive, multi-year initiatives before they see value.”

Exostar’s Supplier Portal serves as a focal point for access to services, dashboards, and reports supporting partner engagement and information exchange while delivering an outstanding customer experience. Supplier Management facilitates and expedites supplier qualification and onboarding; supports ongoing integrated risk management activities such as assessment of supplier security and compliance with ITAR, NIST 800-171, and other regulatory requirements. Content Sharing enables automated, secure, compliant content management and document exchange throughout the supply chain, with full traceability and auditing. Master Data Management provides a central repository of pre-qualified supplier information that serves as a single source of truth across the supplier network. Customer Identity Management supports the issuance to, and strong authentication of credentials for, individuals across the supplier network – effectively and compliantly controlling access to applications, information, and other assets.

The digital platform helps organizations reduce cost and risk, tighten schedules, and improve quality by identifying and more rapidly onboarding new sources of qualified suppliers; providing a fully-integrated supplier risk management process that leverages data and analytics to create a consistent, holistic, trusted view of suppliers; and migrating critical supplier collaboration activities from vulnerable methods such as manual- or email-based communications to a highly-secure environment.

With Exostar’s Digital Platform, supply chain management moves beyond automation to include all of the benefits of digitized supply chains. Highly-regulated organizations can position themselves to fully embrace and benefit from technologies designed for digital business, such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics.