Supply chain roundup
Tips and tools from experts in planning, execution, and event management
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
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Dynamically define initiation periods;
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Advanced assortment planning, including support for assortment target setting, attribute planning, and advanced style/color designation;
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Extended labor management, including enhanced long-range planning, monitoring, and engineered standards flexibility;
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Advanced reverse-logistics carrier selection and support for complex routing;
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Global inventory visibility functionality;
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Transportation optimization, including the ability to plan multileg, multimodal shipments within a single transportation run; and
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Multizone capabilities and extended voice recognition integration for the warehouse.
Inventory optimization
Microsoft, DuPont, and Celanese became Optiant customers in Q1 2006, joining Intel and Kraft after Optiant brought a new management team aboard and became an SAP-certified partner. The SAP tie-in is critical, says Jonathan Colehower, president and CEO of the supply chain design and inventory optimization vendor.
"Eighty percent of our customers run SAP," Colehower says. "We fill in a white space in their solution, and being certified resonates with CEOs because it affects the total cost of ownership."
The company finished 2005 exceeding Q4 plan, and entered the new fiscal year with a strong pipeline that resulted in beating plan again—110 percent over projection for the first quarter.
"If you look at Optiant historically, it has closed about two or three deals a quarter," explains Colehower. "We closed six deals in first-quarter 2006, and I want to get to 10 deals, which is where we need to be if we want to scale." Optiant is doing that by paying close attention to the fundamentals, and by integrating and filling a critical gap in SAP, Oracle, and Manugistics product lines," he adds.
Visibility and optimization
"None of the challenges to the supply chain are new, but the speed at which they're happening is accelerating," claimed Pete Sinisgalli, president and CEO of supply chain execution vendor Manhattan Associates, upon announcing enhancements to the vendor's Integrated Planning and Integrated Logistics solutions. The consequences of failing to keep apace the rate of events is significant. Sinisgalli says companies in the U.S. spend approximately $1 trillion a year to run their supply chains.
Manhattan reports these key functional and technical enhancements:
Performance management
Supply Chain Consultants (SCC) reports new supply chain performance management capabilities in its Zemeter software suite that enable real-time visibility to key supply chain metrics.
Zemeter Performance Management gathers and monitors data, presenting it in daily views of demand, supply, and financial performance. Imbalances trigger early-warning indicators that automatically alert decision makers to prompt timely action and prevent performance degradation. Drill-down capabilities permit analysis by product family, region, and customer.
"The emphasis traditionally has been on crisis management, with tools and processes to expedite, replan, and firefight," says Sujit Singh, VP of supply chain solutions. "But if you monitor when processes go out of bounds, you can attack problems and do something about them before they impact the business."
Early detection and rapid response eliminate costly consequences such as expediting, which boosts costs and reduces margins, or worse, can cause the permanent loss of a customer, Singh adds.
