2012 Readers' Choice: Supply Chain Planning
There’s something different about the Supply Chain Planning list this year. It shrunk considerably from 10 to five companies, with respondents awarding more votes to a much smaller group of vendors than ever before. SAP led the pack by a mile for both large and small businesses. What does the drastic change in the results imply for the CG industry? Lora Cecere, partner, Altimeter Group, provides answers.
What can you say about the votes being concentrated on only five vendors this year?
Cecere: It means that there is a lot of consolidation. As the ERP and APS markets have matured, there are fewer choices and the software is being aggregated into portfolios.
What about the results themselves? Is this what you would expect in this category?
Cecere: Yes and no. The big suite ERP vendors enjoy strong loyalty with the CIO, but sometimes high frustration with the line-of-business user. In my opinion, the companies that provide the best customer experiences are rated at the bottom here. Terra Technology does a great job on delivering the customer experience. This is the same with Logility. User conferences and sales interactions are high touch, but they are rated number four and five. I am also surprised that a large ERP company rated so highly for small and medium businesses. The cost and implementation time of enterprise applications is still a major concern for companies of this size.
What trends will impact the CG industry in this area?
Cecere: There are several: Mobility, social/e-commerce convergence, new forms of predictive analytics and business intelligence visualization, and better use of demand signals.
Are there supply chain planning opportunities for companies of all sizes or are there different considerations for different sizes?
Cecere: Supply chain planning comes in all shapes and sizes. There are a lot of considerations, and the good news is that the price point for the solution is considerably less.
Breakout Favorites
Customer Experience Leader: Logility
“Logility’s robust product functionality and great customer support allows us to effectively manage Cooper Vision’s complex supply chain, improve customer service and become more sophisticated in our supply chain approaches.”
— Lee Dame, Vice President, Global Supply Chain, CooperVision
SMB Market Leader: SAP
“SAP BusinessByDesign helps us take our company operations to the next level by providing a comprehensive set of business tools that help us address the current and future demands of our business.”
— Jonathan Burth, Chief Operating Officer, Vita Coco