Connect the Dots 2
In the last years of the last millennium, a new category of software emerged to capture the imagination of the ERP industry. Now it’s happening again.
The last-millennium software category was known as Supply Chain Planning (SCP). The idea was to use sophisticated algorithms and some powerful math to model your manufacturing capacity and compare it to your aggregated demand. By modeling all demand and all capacity, you could batch orders together more efficiently and build more products for less money in less time. It was a compelling idea and a number of math wizards made a bundle of money building the software. Today, most every ERP company has a reasonably good Supply Chain Planning engine.
So why is it happening again? Because SCP gave you efficiency but not visibility. As we noted in last week’s Opinionizer, it’s often hard to answer simple customer questions like, “Where’s my order?” An SCP engine can actually make the problem worse because it allows you to aggregate demand at a much higher level. Individual orders are even harder to see because they’re combined in ever larger batches.
To improve customer service, we’ve created Supply Chain Orders, a product that allows you to batch orders together while still maintaining visibility of individual orders. We’ve asked around and we think we’re breaking new ground here. Our analyst friends immediately grasp the benefits of Supply Chain Orders and also say they haven’t seen anything like it (with the possible exception of Baan’s solution for the aerospace industry).
We think that we’re creating not only a new product but also a new product category. In our humble opinion, the category should be called Supply Chain Visualization software. The whole idea is to connect the dots and visualize what’s going on in a complex supply chain. It also means seeing the ripple effects of order changes in real time. It’s a tall order and we think we’re the first to solve it in a comprehensive way. If the BigCo ERP vendors would like to license our technology, we’d be happy to talk.
As its name implies, The Lawson Opinionizer offers opinions. We believe we've got our facts straight but we don't guarantee it. A new Opinionizer appears every Monday. If you have an opinion, send an e-mail to Opinionizer@lawson.com
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