LLamasoft, long known for strong supply chain design expertise, says that “supply chain design, modeling and analytics” is the more appropriate way to think about this Ann Arbor, Michigan-based firm. Now the last independent supply chain network design firm, LLamasoft focuses on the supply chain execution (that is to say, not planning) side of things. Toby Brzoznowski (co-founder and executive vice president) reports that the company is continuing to grow very fast, broaden its product lines, and invest heavily in R&D. Which is, after all, what you would expect from a vendor promising to deliver a full end-to-end view of all supply chain activities down to the last operational detail. Read the rest of this entry »

About the only thing that gets us more excited than analytics is predictive analytics, and so when we saw an IBM press release entitled “IBM Introduces Predictive Analytics Software and Services that Forecast Asset Failure,” we knew we had to ask some questions about a new IBM offering called Predictive Analytics Optimization (PAO). TEC went right to the source, and spoke with IBM’s director of business analytics strategy, Erick Brethenoux, to find out more. Read the rest of this entry »

The Plex Systems team was in town recently. TEC’s P.J. Jakovljevic and I took the opportunity to sit down with the new Plex CEO, Jason Blessing, as well as V.P. of Corporate Strategy Jim Shepherd, and V.P. of Marketing Patrick Fetterman. Read the rest of this entry »

Many companies today are obviously interested in using enterprise technology that they can access via the cloud. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model avails companies, as is well known, of technology without a large fixed cost, and that is device independent, and accessible by more users, without continual upgrades to worry about. While there are the oft-mentioned concerns around security (which we will not get into here), and SaaS is not the right software delivery model for every client for every deployment, there is no denying that SaaS has much to offer in the right situation.

We have been talking with clients and others about the influence of the cloud in supply chain areas such as these: Read the rest of this entry »

At the NRF BIG Retail Show 2013, a new relationship was announced between Kronos and Manhattan Associates to help retailers profitably integrate their physical stores into their digital selling strategy. The idea is to allow retailers to increase customer satisfaction and drive sales by freeing up trapped inventory in the store and elsewhere in the upstream supply chain, while managing labor costs.

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Commodity value chain and supply chain planning (SCP) software apps merged yesterday when Triple Point Technology acquired WAM Systems. Triple Point is a global provider of cloud and on-premises commodity management software that delivers advanced analytics for optimizing end-to-end commodity and energy value chains. Its solutions manage volatile commodity trading, procurement, enterprise risk management, logistics, scheduling, storage/inventory, processing, settlement, and accounting. More than 400 customers in over 35 countries across industries including energy, metals, minerals, chemicals, agriculture, shipping, consumer products, food and beverage, retail, and manufacturing depend on Triple Point solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

I am very excited to be joining Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) as senior analyst, supply chain management.

TEC’s decision-support engine, robust feature/function models, and rich database of vendor capabilities enable TEC clients to realize faster time-to-value in software decisions.  Watching the evolution of how clients use software advisory firms, and, then, starting up my own analyst firm, has persuaded me more strongly than ever of the value of such an online capability for software evaluation. Read the rest of this entry »

For over a decade, Arena Solutions has been redefining the product lifecycle management (PLM) space with a suite of cloud applications that enable engineering, manufacturing, and their extended supply chains to work better together — from first prototype to full-scale production. In 2000, the two co-founders founded bom.com, a Web-based application for managing items, bills of material (BOMs), and engineering changes (this was the world’s first cloud-native PLM system).

In 2002, bom.com changed its name to Arena Solutions and expanded into a full engineering change order (ECO) management and collaboration tool that is used by thousands of people, including seven of the top ten contract manufacturers in the world. Arena has helped hundreds of innovative manufacturers bring better products to market faster with its cloud offerings that speed prototyping, reduce scrap, and help them collaborate on product changes with strategic partners across the globe. The vendor has over 500 corporate customers, 20,000 individual users, and millions of BOMs in the system.

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As I’m in the process of developing the 2012 Supply Chain Management (SCM) Buyer’s Guide, which will be discussing the challenges that businesses face with managing their supply chains and the role of software in mitigating those challenges, I thought it would be worthwhile to conduct a short survey and see how companies today are faring with some important SCM issues. This survey will shed light on the areas often eluding businesses and that are wreaking havoc on their supply chains, as well as areas that are receiving much attention. The results, as well as recommendations for improvement, will be integrated into the buyer’s guide, which is slated for publication in March of this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Globalization has lost its novelty. For most goods-driven enterprises it has become a matter of fact, just to stay in the game. However, the level of complexity that doing business globally entails can be daunting for professionals in charge of overseeing the supply chain—especially when the business needs to be nimble to keep ahead. Nimble can be painfully complex, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. That’s where global trade management (GTM) comes in. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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). 

Read the rest of this entry »

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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The landscape of the supply chain has changed drastically over the past five years. It went from local to global in manufacturing, procurement, sourcing, logistics, and customers. As such, there are some major challenges in the supply chain network: Read the rest of this entry »

For many retailers, price optimization is not being implemented appropriately because of the lack of communication between the supply and demand cycles. Read the rest of this entry »