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LOUISIANA La. — “New name and new mission.” That’s how the director of Louisiana's Center for Business and Information Technologies summed up everything recently. Sitting in his office in Abdalla Hall, Ramesh Kolluru said the center was called the Apparel-Computer Integrated Manufacturing Center.

“Its job was to help develop apparel manufacturing jobs in Acadiana,” he said. “We were also tasked with helping companies improve the way they were doing things and making themselves more efficient.”

The North American Free Trade Act changed all of that. “With NAFTA, all the apparel jobs went south of the border,” he said. “NAFTA took a lot of jobs from this region and it took our basic mission with it.”

The loss of apparel jobs put the center in an awkward position, he said.

“Here we had a center dedicated to help an certain industry,” Kolluru said. “Only, the industry left.”

A change was in order, Kolluru said.

“We expanded our focus,” he said. “Now, we were looking at not only what happened in a particular shop, but we were looking at the entire supply chain.”

The Center for Business and Information Technologies has a simple aim: Help Louisiana companies prosper by developing Internet-based applications like an online directory.

“The center’s mission went from developing manufacturing improvements to helping businesses find a balance between the supply and demand of their product,” Kolluru said. “We saw the problem as being much larger than manufacturing and knew that because some companies had moved their manufacturing out of the country, these firms would need help managing their inventory and supply chains.”

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John Sullivan