Inventory Planning Blog

Reports and Spreadsheets– An Unproductive Combination for Inventory Planning

Reports and spreadsheets should be used to provide a basic level of information. However, many companies and planners use reports & spreadsheets to completely manage their inventory. To understand the use of these tools on effectiveness and efficiency in inventory planning let’s explore each one independently.

SaaS will be $14.5 Billion Market this year!

Revenue for the worldwide software-as-a-service (SaaS) market will grow by 18% in 2012 to $14.5 billion, according to new research from Gartner, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company.  The SaaS market will be worth $14.5 billion in 2012, and is expected to expand up to $22.1 billion by 2015. That 2015 figure is an increase of almost $1 billion from the prediction Gartner made last year.

SaaS adoption is being driven by platform-as-a-service development communities and has increased its estimate for the value of the SaaS market in 2015 by almost $1billion, up to $22.1 billion says Analyst Company.

SaaS adoption in 2012 will be driven by the growth of the platform-as-a-service developer communities, Gartner said, as well as a growing interest in cloud computing. Organizations most commonly use SaaS for horizontal applications (i.e. applications that address business divisions, rather than specific industries) with common processes, Gartner said, but added that there was increasing interest in vertical-specific offerings.

Sharon Mertz, a Gartner research director, said the issues holding back SaaS deployments varied strongly by region. "Limited flexibility of customization and limited integration to existing systems are the primary reasons in North America," she said. "In EMEA, network instability is the issue most frequently encountered, whereas longer-than-expected deployments are the top issue in Asia/Pacific." Gartner said it is seeing increasing penetration of North American SaaS vendors into the Western European market, forecasting Western Europe's SaaS revenues to surpass $3.2 billion this year, up 35% from $2.7 billion in 2011.

www.gartner.com
TechNavio’s analysts forecast the Global SCM Software market to grow at a CAGR of 8.7 percent over the period 2010–2014. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the need to boost productivity and improve decision making. The Global SCM Software market has also been witnessing the increasing demand of SCM in the retail sector. However, increasing complexity of supply chain networks could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

TechNavio’s report, Global Supply Chain Management Software Market 2010–2014, has been prepared based on an in-depth analysis of the market with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the Americas, and the EMEA and APAC regions; it also covers the Global SCM Software market landscape and its growth prospects in the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.

http://www.technavio.com/

 WAYS TO IMPROVE REPLENISHMENT PLANNING

Intelligent replenishment inventory planning includes several components, of which forecasting is just one element. Complete, automated planning systems handle all behavior including low volume items as part of a total process. Advanced planning solutions also incorporate inventory optimization, which dramatically improve replenishment planning. Why? Because optimization considers the wild cards in planning. It considers how random the demand of an item is, i.e., standard deviation and service level objectives, and it does it for each item, at every location, leaving nothing to chance (no spreadsheet can do that!)