Supply Chain Management
Demand and supply chain management has gotten more difficult as the product life cycles get shorter and the supply chains get longer as goods are sourced from more distant places. Increasingly, companies are looking at software that can aggregate point-of-sale data from multiple sources, analyze it to predict demand for individual categories of products, optimize the supply chain and help in pricing.
Several different pieces of software are used in demand and supply chain management. One of them is revenue optimization software which takes into account information on demand, the costs and determines the best price to offer based on elasticity of demand. Conversely, it can take the prices offered by competitors as given and throw up the numbers for the desired demand and supply. Such software can also pinpoint customer segments most likely to respond to a particular offer. Manugistics, a supply chain management software vendor, is one company that leads in this segment of the market. However, revenue optimization software does takes into account existing demand before it cranks out figures on prices and potential segments to target.
The suppliers would rather that they could forecast demand accurately and produce as much so that they can receive better price deals. This is best achieved by using demand forecasting software that helps with supply chain management. The successful implementation of demand forecasting tools presupposes the collection of point-of-sales data and the willingness of retailers to share such information with their vendors. Besides supply chain management software providers such as i2 and Manugistics, Business Intelligence vendors such as NCR Teradata, Business Objects, Cognos, and Prescient are the players in the segment.
An additional piece of software for collaborating in real time is the software for supply chain management to collaborate with vendors, manage logistics and to share information. Oracle’s 11i E-Business Suite, for example, includes iSupplier and Collaborative Planning portal to communicate with offshore contract manufacturers and suppliers with web based tools.