Part 1 of this series analyzed the late-March acquisition of long-struggling inventory optimization (IO) provider Optiant by long well-performing supply chain management (SCM) provider Logility. I then discussed Logility’s acquisition history to set the stage for the current offerings that Optiant will join.The 2004 acquisition of Demand Management, Inc. (DMI) and its Demand Solutions brand was especially valuable as it provided more than 800 active customers in the growing small and midsize enterprise (SME) market for Logility. Today, Logility’s customer base encompasses about 1,250 companies located in more than 70 countries, which gives Logility the largest installed base of supply chain planning (SCP) customers among application software vendors. Moreover, Logility is possibly the only SCP vendor that can meet the needs of SMEs, large companies (i.e., from US $200 million to US $1 billion in revenues), and Fortune 1000 markets (with over US$1 billion in revenues).

Part 2 thus first analyzed the Demand Solutions product line [evaluate this product] to the SME market through DMI’s global value added resellers (VAR) network. The article then started to analyze the Logility Voyager Solutions suite [evaluate this product], which is a broader SCM offering for the upper end of the market. The final part of this blog series now continues with the analysis of the Logility Voyager Solutions suite and analyzes how Optiant might fit in.

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Part 1 of this series analyzed the late-March acquisition of long struggling inventory optimization (IO) provider Optiant by long well-performing supply chain management (SCM) provider Logility. The blog post then discussed Logility’s acquisition history to set the stage for the current offerings that Optiant will join.

The 2004 acquisition of Demand Management, Inc. (DMI) and its Demand Solutions brand was particularly valuable as it provided more than 800 active customers in the growing small and midsize enterprise (SME) market for Logility. Today, Logility’s customer base encompasses about 1,250 companies located in more than 70 countries.

These facts give Logility the largest installed base of supply chain planning (SCP) customers among application software vendors. Logility is possibly the only SCP vendor that can meet the needs of SMEs, large companies (i.e., from US $200 million to US $1 billion in revenues), and Fortune 1000 markets (with over US$1 billion in revenues). 

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The mergers and acquisition (M&A) market seems to be coming back slowly. One evidence of this could be the late-March acquisition of long-struggling inventory optimization (IO) provider Optiant by long well-performing supply chain management (SCM) provider Logility.

Now, I certainly wasn’t surprised by Optiant’s acquisition per se. After all, it was only a matter of time before Optiant would be acquired (or simply go out of business).

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About two years ago, my colleague P.J. Jakovljevic wrote a blog post about SYSPRO, which started with the description of a very interesting strategy that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor used to target its customers: PragmaVision. By introducing this concept, SYSPRO was showing that their product addresses the needs of decision makers that are both visionary (ready to embrace new technology) and pragmatic (not willing to test new products and waiting for them to prove their strengths). Read the rest of this entry »

According to the proverb “calamity is the touchstone of a brave mind,” in these tough times some supply chain management (SCM) vendors have been trying to take stock (no pun intended) of their offerings and how best to offer these to customers, to mutual benefit. In fact, I have recently seen some intriguing (if not bizarre) press releases (PRs), which read like some type of whitepapers or presentation transcripts.

They were certainly different (and therefore refreshing) from the customary dry and fluffy PRs that most communications folks use (especially during ordinary times). One such “educational” PR came this past summer from the spend management vendor Emptoris, and was analyzed in my blog post on five procurement commandments in a down economy.

A more recent similar PR came from JDA Software Group Inc., a provider of integrated merchandising and supply chain and revenue management planning, execution, and optimization solutions for the consumer-driven supply chain and services industries.  The PR came on the heels of the worldwide economy continuing to struggle and going into a tailspin, whereby new orders in the manufacturing sector are falling at record rates.

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For residents and tourists of Paris (France), using RER or Paris Metro is certainly a way to save on commuting costs (and parking frustrations) compared to owning and renting cars. This blog post is not about transportation, but rather about an inventory management method with a similar name.

Namely, this blog post is about RIR or Rapid Inventory Rightsizing, which is an innovative new program to help embattled companies relatively quickly free up cash and reduce the impact of the current global credit crunch on their supply chains. This pretty straightforward concept and message of improving a free cash flow (FCF) came recently from ToolsGroup, a global provider of demand-driven inventory optimization (IO) solutions. Regular readers of this blog site might remember my recent series on shortening long tails of supply chains, where ToolsGroup was also the protagonist. Read the rest of this entry »

Part II of this blog series explained ToolsGroup’s value proposition for achieving service level excellence in distribution environments. The point of the Service Optimizer 99+ (SO99+) suite’s name is that a “99+ percentage” represents the gold standard in customer service levels, and it takes a product purposely built to achieve service level excellence and to support such a high standard.

ToolsGroup’s latest version of software continues to build on the functionality needed to reach this goal.

Back to Mitigating Long Tails

Having put the necessary pieces in place, over the past year ToolsGroup has turned a particularly keen eye toward how to succeed in environments with a “long tail” demand. The long tail theory originally held that in an environment such as the Internet-based retailers (so called “e-tailers”), which is less affected by physical manufacturing, product and distribution constraints than so-called “brick-and-mortar” retailers, demand will spread across a huge array of items (a.k.a., stock-keeping units or SKUs). Read the rest of this entry »