Supply Chain Players Toss a Few Barbs as Competition Heats Up

SAP's Gregory Mekjian bristles with indignation after hearing that rival Manugistics CEO Greg Owens suggested mySAP Supply Chain Management is insufficiently scalable for enterprise clients' needs.

"You'd have to ask our customers what their thoughts are about that," said Mekjian, vice president of supply chain management and product life cycle management at SAP, whose clients include Compaq Computer and Geneva Pharmaceuticals.

For good measure, Mekjian volleys one back. "Our customers tell us Manugistics is only capable of doing supply chain planning," he said. On the other hand, because SAP's software integrates planning, execution and ERP functions, "it's very alluring to customers, who can do one-stop shopping. They don't want to worry about whether the [vendor is viable, whether it's coming or going," Mekjian added.

While the zingers fly, players such as i2, Oracle and J.D. Edwards are also stirring the supply chain management pot as the economy begins to recover and client projects move out of the pipeline and into deployment.

Each competitor has its own value proposition to sell, analysts say.

"Manugistics is focusing on pricing and revenue optimization," said Jill Jenkins, senior analyst at Current Analysis. "I2 has decided they don't want to do that, but they've [invested in developing order-management features. And SAP has the same basic features as an i2 or a Manugistics."

Yet SAP has historically focused more on supply chain execution aspects such as logistics, Jenkins said. SAP's partners said they are starting to get more supply chain management business.

"Business is picking up," said Padman Ramankutty, CEO of Bristlecone, a Santa Clara, Calif., solution provider founded by former SAP employees. Since late March, Bristlecone has seen an uptick in the number of proposals, he said.

The company focuses on implementing supply chain management solutions, Ramankutty said. SAP products almost always figure in some way, but Bristlecone is not precluded from working with software from i2 and other supply chain management software manufacturers, he said.

As for SAP's supply chain management strengths, Ramankutty cited support for the ability to plan supply chain needs at the product level. "If you're talking about paper or steel content, it's very difficult to model [grades and types of steel and paper with [competing tools," he said.

That same strength applies to SAP's supply chain execution software, Ramankutty said. And he likes the "holistic approach" to planning and execution,not to mention links to ERP applications,that SAP is migrating toward.

For its part, SAP hopes the installed base for its ERP products will help the company along as it makes a bigger push into supply chain management.

Mekjian acknowledges that the company did not effectively communicate its supply chain vision to prospective customers. "We let i2 and Manugistics and Siebel go and educate our customers on what they thought the marketplace was all about," he said. "But what we're finding is that over the last eight to 12 months, customers have started coming back to SAP. They want the full [supply chain life cycle, from the creation of the order to the determination of fulfillment to shipping."

SAP recently added enhancements to its mySAP supply chain management offering, including special features for companies in the high-tech, automotive, chemical, pharmaceutical, consumer packaged goods, oil and gas, and pulp-and-paper products industries.

New features aimed at car companies, for example, include support for procurement of materials used to manufacture different cars in the same plant, and a planning matrix that factors in activity increases or decreases to allow for the most efficient use of labor resources.