The supply chain planning market has been experiencing broad-based, above-trend growth. "Suppliers reported growth across SCP applications, geographical regions, and end user industry segments. This is being driven by a couple of prominent adoption trends and a release of pent-up demand from the preceding worldwide economic downturn," according to Clint Reiser, enterprise software analyst, and the principal author of ARC's "Supply Chain Planning Worldwide Outlook."

Integrated Business Planning Fuels Growth

Businesses have recently exhibited pronounced interest in integrated business planning, including S&OP planning. Organizations continue to integrate historically disparate processes to obtain a more comprehensive view of their overall operations. This ongoing maturity and increasing sophistication of corporate business processes is contributing to increased adoption of S&OP solutions as companies attempt to take their planning to the next level. The value proposition of S&OP solutions is also being enhanced by other high-growth supporting technologies, such as business analytics and high-speed, in-memory computing technology.

Demand Management Is a Priority

Sales of demand management applications remain robust as companies continue to focus on aligning product availability with demand. Today's solutions provide planners with standardized functionality to dynamically model numerous factors, such as seasonality, promotion up-lift, and pricing effects. The feature and usability improvements enable companies to accurately predict demand at various product levels across a vast number of SKU locations. The increasing use of demand signal repositories by large consumer goods companies and food and beverage companies is also contributing to increased use of demand management solutions. Demand signal repositories increase the volume, recentness and overall value of POS data. The increased value offered by this data will increase the potential value companies can extract from its use within the demand planning process, and will therefore increase adoption of demand planning solutions.

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Source: ARC Advisory Group