Gartner’s Top Ten User-Rated Supply Chain Planning Capabilities

Gartner Research recently released its new Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Planning System of Record (SCP SOR) in which 485 user companies identified their top ten rated planning capabilities for delivering SCP goals. They are:

• Ability to provide an integrated planning environment that allows for a single version of the truthfor a supply chain
• Ability to easily integrate with all necessary transaction systems
• Ability to manage planning processes
• Ability to plan very quickly across the supply chain network
• Ability to easily run reports or analytics on the planning data
• Functional depth of a vendor’s SCP solution
• Total cost of ownership
• Functional breadth of a vendor’s SCP SOR solution
• Ability to easily design their own analytics to run on planning or transactional data
• Vendor’s domain or industry expertise

Gartner says that “Choosing an SCP SOR is a key decision. Not only must it provide planning integration and visibility across a supply chain, it also must provide a critical steppingstone in an SCP technology roadmap that will help enable the business’s future SCP aspirations.” Therefore they recommend looking not just at what your company is currently looking to achieve, but also at where the company wants to be in the future. Those topics cited in the report included:

• Standardization – standardizing on a particular SCP technology to leverage skills, integration and best practices across the organization in support of Stage 3 maturity  
• Integrated operational planning – supporting a strong S&OP process linked back to operations and execution, as well as across other planning domains in the company
• Data and process integration – along the supply chain, supported by a single version of the truth, improved plan visibility and strong internal collaboration
• Improved planning functionality – additional planning functionality within the context of integrated operational planning environments, helping to avoid islands of process, data or optimization
• Multienterprise enablement – Bringing together two or more organizations into shared activities, while supporting the various needs of each organization. This necessitates the use of multienterprise supply chain business networks for transactional visibility across the business ecosystem, including a company’s value chain, the community of trading partners and external data, such as supplier risk profiles.

Gartner also commented on which legacy systems most often are replaced by new SCP software platforms. The most often replaced (starting with most often) are:

1. Excel
2. In-house-developed solutions
3. ERP-based planning
4. Outdated or discontinued “legacy” vendor software
5. Small vendors offering only a portion of the planning landscape (for example, only demand planning or only production scheduling)

Gartner adds “Vendors that have successfully migrated to fully integrated planning suites (in other words, an SCP SOR) are least likely to be replaced by another SCP solution or vendor. Such solutions provide an SCP SOR platform that forms the foundation for more mature planning processes to meet changing business needs.”