Selecting a supply chain planning tool: Are you doing it all wrong?

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the July-August 2019 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

July-August 2019

If you’re a long-time reader of Supply Chain Management Review, you’re familiar with Larry Lapide’s “Insights” column. Typically, Larry is writing about the many facets of planning, but occasionally, he takes on a provocative topic. One year, he questioned whether it was necessary to be a Top 25 supply chain leader, especially if in your industry, good enough gets the job done.

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A common supply chain planning mistake many organizations make is to assume that technology is the starting point for transformation. But a technology-first approach gets it backward. We recommend a more holistic and structured approach in which your technology solution is driven by a specific set of root problems identified through a formalized process.

We’ve used this holistic approach to help numerous clients identify and select the appropriate technology solutions to meet their needs and drive results.

Planning begins with process

Supply chain planning solutions range from bolt-on point fixes to full enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. Point solutions are typically Cloud-based SaaS tools designed to solve a specific problem—forecasting or sales and operations planning (S&OP), for example; they are highly configurable and adaptable to your business processes and can be directly integrated with your company’s ERP system.

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