E2open Expands Cloud Capabilities For Supply Chain Managers

E2open, a provider of cloud-based service for collaborative planning and execution across global trading networks, today announced the availability of E2 Planning and Response version 11.2, which includes improved “what-if” scenario and simulation capabilities, network planning visualization and analytics, and certified SAP adapters.

“With our acquisition of icon-scm, we merged two great teams focused on supply chain integration in the cloud, enabling end-to-end decision-making from planning through execution. We are excited to now bring this integrated platform to the market,” says Mark Woodward, President and CEO, E2open. “Integrated supply chain planning and execution is a significant differentiator for E2open. Extending the power of our Business Network into supply chain planning will provide a substantial competitive advantage to our customers.”

Company spokesmen note that with today’s complex, global supply chains, it can be extremely taxing for businesses to pinpoint the location of the real constraints in their current production and delivery plans. Traditional planning systems lack timely, comprehensive data to create trustworthy plans that considers demand priorities and supply constraints. They also lack fast problem resolution, scenario and decision support capabilities to manage trade-offs. E2 Planning & Response was purposely built to overcome these challenges.

“With our extended capabilities and cloud enablement, we can rapidly unlock business benefits so our customers can overcome the challenge of managing demand they can’t predict with supply they don’t control,” says Stephan Hofmann, Vice President of Products. “E2 Planning & Response further empowers our customers and their trading partners up, down and across the supply chain to commit with confidence.”

E2open extends its innovative network planning and response capabilities with the following enhancements to its Planning and Response modules:

Scenario Management: Provides fast in-memory creation and comparison of planning scenarios. Users can now compare alternative plan versions based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and scorecards, as well as detailed reports. The KPI Framework offers a rich set of pre-defined KPIs and the flexibility to create additional KPIs.

What-if Simulation: Offers powerful impact analysis of demand, supply and master data scenarios. It also enables the application and simulation of different fulfillment strategies and allocation rules.

Network Visualization and Analytics: Users benefit from plan visualization across the extended trading network. The configurable planning cockpit and metric reports provide drill-down capabilities to analyze supply chain health from top to bottom.

SAP-Certified ERP Adapters: E2open’s SAP Adapters provide seamless connectivity with the Data Hub, ensuring high input data quality and information readiness—enabling faster, more confident decision-making. Pre-defined and easily extensible validation rules on master and transaction entities allow for efficient data cleansing, ensuring data quality for planning results that users can rely on.

Michael Schmitt, chief marketing officer at E2open, told SCMR in an interview that he’s seeing two key trends that are taking hold this year.

“The first is a rapid shift in investment from point to point manual communications to collaborative business networks,” he says. “Business leaders realize that complete, timely, synchronized data between brand owners and their trading partners is critical to confident decision making. Companies have had it with partial, latent data leading to decisions that are more guesswork than fact-based.”

Schmitt adds that supply chain executives and practitioners need timely, complete information so they can commit with confidence to their customers and stakeholders.

“Secondly, we’re seeing the further integration of planning and execution,” he says. “Decision making is moving from centralized planning into the network. This strategy requires network connectivity of real-time information so activity can be continuously monitored for potential and real disruptions.”

  With cross network visibility and network planning and response tools, Schmitt says demand priorities and constrained supply can be modeled at a granular level and “what-if” analyses run.

“Trading partners can review alternative scenarios to determine the best decision to support corporate and collective network priorities,” he adds.

Finally, says Schmitt, Cloud-based technologies are creating a “tipping point” in favor of both of these two trends.

“E2 Planning & Response leverages the power of the network for collaborative planning and execution.”

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