Jul 12, 2006
Where the Supply Chain Planning Players are at?
Gartner Research has published its magic quadrant (nothing magical about it but its an informative quadrant though) about the relative competitive position of Supply Chain Planning software vendors for the first half of 2006.
There are three key sectors (Process Manufacturing, Discrete Manufacturing and Distribution Intensive) for which the quadrants were created. They’re available free of charge at Oracle’s site (Magic Quadrants for Supply Chain Planning) at the following links:
1. Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Planning in Process Manufacturing Industries, 1H06
2. Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Planning in Discrete Manufacturing Industries, 1H06
3. Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Planning in Distribution-Intensive Industries, 1H06
What I wanted to determine from perusing these quadrants was the criteria by which certain firms’ SCP software was categorized as visionary and others as followers or laggards. Here is the summary of firms seen as visionaries (as opposed to niche players) in various segments of the SCP marketplace.
| Process Manufacturing | Discrete Manufacturing | Distribution Intensive |
| Aspen | i2 | i2 |
| i2 | SAP | SAP |
| Manugistics | Oracle | Logility |
| SAP | – | – |
| Oracle | – | – |
| Logility | – | – |
According to the report, a visionary has to demonstrate:
- A developing global support strategy
- Five customer references in each targeted vertical industry
- Differentiated vertical-industry domain expertise and unique industry-specific functionality
- Development beyond a third vertical-industry-specific solution
- Development support for a multi-enterprise architecture on an SOA platform
- A targeted presence leading to influence and activity into how aspects of the market evolve