Supply On DemandSupply On Demand

That concept has Whirlpool very interested. The appliance manufacturer would like to feed accurate supply information into its forecasting software, as well as information that indicates a potential problem, such as a factory line that's falling behind. That would improve Whirlpool's forecasts even more and make it more likely the company could deliver the exact number of products it promised. With integrated information from its warehouse, distribution center, and production systems, Whirlpool would be able to spot trouble before it gets out of control. "If there's a problem, we'll be able to quickly channel our retailers toward products that are available," Sagar says. "And our sales promotions can be more useful because we'll only promote what we know we can deliver."

I2 6.0 may help Whirlpool tap into its forecasting software data from other applications. The new architecture includes middleware that acts as a translator between legacy applications, such as ERP systems, and i2's planning tools. "We're trying to close the loop between planning and execution to help companies achieve agility and optimize their business," says Pallab Chatterjee, i2's president of solutions operations.

I2 also has a new master data layer that companies can use to synchronize and populate all their applications whenever there's a change in the supply chain. For example, if a company adds a supplier, all the information about that supplier has to be entered into every app. "Right now, there are armies of people who do nothing but try and reflect changes in the applications," Chatterjee says.

Manugistics' newest release will focus much more on business processes. It features an embedded business-process management tool that will let the vendor, by this fall, offer out-of-the-box workflows that indicate which steps to take and which data to gather during a particular event. For example, if a company is about to sell out of a certain product, the workflow might automatically find what orders will be affected, issue a request for quotes to suppliers, and notify customers. Manugistics will work with its customers over the next few months to define those workflows in hopes of releasing several of them this fall. "Today, users know in their heads the steps that need to happen, and they're doing them manually and sequentially," says Lori Mitchell-Keller, senior VP of market strategy for Manugistics. "With business-process management, companies can respond much more quickly."

Vendors will also be pumping up the analytics in their supply-chain software in the coming year. PeopleSoft is building directly into its supply-chain applications analytics that will let users perform "what-if" scenarios and other analyses within the application, rather than by launching a data mart or separate reporting software. "Analysis can be done in the context of the business process," says John Webb, VP of product management for PeopleSoft's supply-chain management software. "You can look at the past: What were my inventory turns for the last quarter? You can look at current data: What's my order backlog? Is it growing or shrinking? And you can look forward: How can I make corrective moves? If I want to move from a 95% fill rate of making orders on time to 98%, what needs to be done?"

In November, PeopleSoft plans to add embedded analytics capabilities to its Supply Chain Planning Solution to let businesses link their supply-chain planning with budgeting. Meanwhile, the vendor continues to revamp all its applications to support Enterprise Warehouse, the data warehouse introduced with PeopleSoft 8 in 2000 that serves as a consolidated information repository from which reporting and analysis can be done. In June, PeopleSoft says it will offer supply-chain planning software that leverages Enterprise Warehouse. That means businesses will be able to mix operational data with sales information when running forecasts, for example. The new software will include demand-planning forecasting and forecast collaboration, a supply-planning tool that does multisite distribution and manufacturing planning, and inventory-policy planning.

While analytics and forecasting tools may help companies better understand what all the data means, sometimes the best thing a vendor can do is make its software simpler. "The sophisticated algorithms haven't been all that useful," says Gene Tyndall, associate director of the University of Miami's Center for Advanced Supply Chain Management and formerly executive VP of global supply-chain solutions at Ryder System Inc. "The fact is, often these applications are too complicated. Vendors need to make screens easier to understand and the apps easier to use."

Tyndall and others also caution that companies need to weigh the value of providing a flow of real-time information or risk drowning in data. "Not everything has to be real time," Tyndall says. "Do we need real time with all our suppliers? Or just the real-time suppliers?"

Vendors are adding alerts and filters to try to help managers absorb that real-time data more easily. SAP's Enterprise Portal lets users set policies that trigger alerts if they're not met. For example, if data from an inventory-management system sent to SAP's Supply Chain Event Management application indicates that inventory has fallen below a certain level, an alert engine within the portal could trigger an E-mail to a certain supplier to begin restocking the inventory. The goal, says Christian Knoll, VP of global supply-chain initiatives for SAP, is to reduce the time it takes to get the best information and give companies more flexibility in acting on that data. "The better information I have, the higher the quality of my decision. The faster I am, the more competitive," he says.

That's what everybody's aiming for: supply-chain systems that deliver the best information at the right time to the right people.