E2open Takes Amber Road’s Supply Chain Solution Private

Supply chain management firm E2open is expanding its operations through the acquisition of Amber Road, the companies announced on Tuesday (July 2).

E2open subsidiary Chicago Merger Sub acquired Amber Road, a cloud-based global trade management software provider by buying its outstanding stock and merging, said the press release. The new private company, Amber Road, aims to expand margins, mitigate risk and promote agility in organizations’ supply chains and global trade operations, by connecting users to a platform that links buyers, sellers and logistics companies.

The acquisition of Amber Road will allow E2open to augment its current offering, which enables companies to manage and forecast demand, supply and delivery constraints to boost efficiency of their supply chains. E2open also operates a supply chain platform, connecting users to data in real time, and analysis driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

The companies did not disclose financial terms of the agreement. The deal saw 23,640,724 shares of common stock of Amber Road, worth about 78.4 percent of outstanding shares, bought by Chicago Merger Sub, according to the press release. As a result of the deal, Amber Road has become a privately held company, and is no longer traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Last December, E2open Senior Vice President of Product and Strategy Pawan Joshi spoke with PYMNTS about some of the biggest challenges of enterprise supply chain management.

“The biggest challenge that large companies face is that companies are not necessarily relying on people that they employ, or their own facilities, to make a product,” he said. “Even the design of some of their product is outsourced.”

Simultaneously, he added, product life cycles are shortening. All of this means less visibility into supply chains, thanks to a fragmented supply chain that includes many companies and service providers.

“The challenge we face today is to change the old practices, the siloed nature of decision-making, the unconnected systems,” he said, “and to really bring to bear the fact that technology can connect all of this — but, in absence of people changing their business processes, it is very difficult to leverage technology.”