i2 Sues SAP over Patents for Supply Chain Optimization

Filed in archive News on September 8, 2006

Supply chain software vendor i2 filed suit in a federal court in Texas this week against SAP (headquartered in Germany) and its SAP Americas unit, claiming a variety of software patent violations.

According to SCDigest, seven patents were cited, most having been awarded in the 1998-2001 time frame, although one was dated 2006.

The patents cover such areas as "an extensible model network representation system for process planning," and a "method for managing available to promised product (ATP)."

The ATP patent, for example, describes a software system that "represents the promises made by the supplier sites to the seller entity assailable to promise product to be used for promising to fill actual customer requests, and adjusts the available to promise product responsive to any promises made to fill actual customer requests. The available to promise product thereby automatically reflects product that has been promised by a supplier site by not promised to a customer."

The patent further states that one unique "invention" is "the ability in a distributed organization with distributed sales people to allocate some of the promises made to forecast requests to certain sales people, thereby preventing them from simultaneously using the same forecast promise as a promise to a customer, without requiring them to check with each other before making promises."

Patent law is very tricky, and software patents even more so. Based on a reading of the ATP patent, for example, it would seem to cover the basics of how ATP is used today, meaning any of several software solutions using available to promise functionality could conceivably also be targets of an i2 intellectual property suit. It is assumed that legal action on i2's part wasn't worth it until a company with the size and growing supply chain presence of SAP presented itself.