By Sabrina Chua

Supply Chain Management (SCM) may have been the focus of the technology sector for the past decade or so, but it is the other side of the coin -- Demand Chain Management (DCM) that is becoming the buzzword now.

While SCM is about reducing inventories and the costs involved in the manufacturing enterprise, DCM is about focusing on the customer as the heart of all business activities and processes, creating more demand from them and managing this demand.

Explaining this latest paradigm at a news conference Monday, Mr Koh Boon Hwee, executive chairman of Internet Technology Group (ITG) said: "The business trend is shifting from supply chain management or SCM, which focuses on reducing internal costs, to DCM, which aims to generate revenue through creating demand, then managing and responding to it in the most effective way."

"While businesses will continue to need SCM solutions such as Enterprise Resource Planning, order processing and stock control applications, there will be increased importance on DCM applications for business intelligence, CRM, personalisation and data mining," he added.

Internet operating and investment holding company, ITG, is one of two investors of Firium, a company which focuses on DCM solutions for the financial services and retail and distribution sectors in the Asia Pacific region.

Firium announced on Monday that Singapore mainboard-listed ITG had sunk in US$5.9 million into the company, while its other investor, the 3i Group, had contributed another US$2.6 million to its first round funding of US$2 million last year.

Projected to grow by 170 percent in revenue this year, Firium will use the US$8.5 million in funding to focus on solutions for the financial services and retail and distribution sectors, as well as regional expansion, including acquisitions in markets such as Thailand and the Philippines.

Firium, whose clients include ABN Amro, Prudential and Motorola, provides solutions such as iPlan, which is a web-based sales and transaction support tool to help financial planners perform proactive financial planning and product sales. It can also be extended to provide customers with the option of self-service banking on the Internet.

On the sudden focus on DCM, Mr Jusuf Sjariffudin, Firium's founder, president and chief executive officer, explained that with the current soft technology market, people are looking at how to retain existing customers and attract new ones.

According to Aberdeen Research, revenues from customer relationship management (CRM) alone will amount to over US$22 billion by 2003.

And overall, IDC forecasts that the global market for demand-supply chain management will grow from US$25.3 billion in 1999 to US$139.8 billion by end 2004.