Planning vendors renew efforts at vertical approach

Every supply chain performs the same essential task—fulfilling demand as efficiently and quickly as possible—but beyond that, there are big differences. An electronics industry supply chain faces a different set of constraints than a consumer packaged goods company or an industrial equipment maker. In response, some supply chain planning vendors are tailoring their software for specific verticals.

This approach resonates with David Halphide, supply planning manager for Irvine, Calif.-based Skyworks, a provider of semiconductor products to the wireless industry. Halphide says it was a deciding factor when pondering which supply chain planning module to deploy. In the end he went with a solution from supply chain management vendor Adexa, whose latest release features additional vertical industry functionality.

"Adexa has pretty strong capabilities with plug-in business rules, and this was a key differentiator between Adexa and the other APS [advanced planning & scheduling] vendors we talked to," Halphide says. "We can plug in rules such as demand prioritization without having to tweak the source code and this provides the ability to configure without permanently customizing your code."

However, not all vendors have embraced verticalization to the same degree. "Different software vendors do different things," says Bill Green, an Adexa VP. "Some will force the customer to do things their way, while others have a ton of R&D people who will customize the vertical at the core coding level for a particular customer."

Adexa uses prepackaged tools that help configure the planning engine to an industry, and adds a layer that houses a series of plug-in business rules particular to the industry.

According to Green, "Modules that are more detailed in nature need to be more vertically focused. If you are doing shop-floor sequencing, or planning to do detailed manufacturing scheduling for jobs that demand a variety of information such as the type of equipment in use, then you'll need more vertically focused customization than you do with a high-level demand planner that does a very similar job from one vertical to another."

Other planning vendors, however, contend there is no sudden shift to vertical solutions. Elliot Sipos, business manager for manufacturing solutions for Matrikon, another planning vendor, says verticalization isn't a new idea. "The move to a vertical niche is pretty obvious. It's always been there, though it may not have been as blatant."

Matrikon focuses on the oil & gas and injection plastics industries. "We've taken the core product and preconfigured it for a particular vertical," says Sipos. "With this approach, you don't have to go through all the modeling that bogs down a typical implementation, [adding months] to the rollout, and chopping time-to-value for the client."