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Collaborative Supply Chain Forecasting (CSCF) is a business discipline involving multiple supply chain stakeholders, including suppliers, distributors and sellers, that is aimed at producing a more accurate forecast of future demand and supply. Participants share supply and demand data, forecasts, assumptions and insights to improve visibility, reduce inefficiencies and attenuate supply-demand...

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Topics: Supply Chain Planning, Business Planning, Enterprise Resource Planning, supply chain management, Business & Technologies, Supply Chain and Operations


The era of ever-liberalizing trade that began in earnest in the 1950s (albeit with periodic ups and downs) came to an epochal end in the 2010s. Over the past decade, the ever-more demanding environment for supply chain planning and execution has forced enterprises to take a more strategic approach to managing these processes. The need for resiliency and adaptability in a rapidly changing world...

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Topics: Supply Chain Planning, Business Planning, Enterprise Resource Planning, supply chain management, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Generative AI, AI and Machine Learning, Automotive, Business & Technologies, CPG & Retail, Supply Chain and Operations


Agents offer almost effortless automation, so repetitive and boring tasks get done with the least amount of work and, perhaps, more consistently. Agents are an important evolutionary step in the design of business software, similar to the transition from procedural programming to event-driven programming that accelerated in the late 1980s. That paradigm shift created the business software...

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Topics: Supply Chain Planning, Business Planning, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, supply chain management, Manufacturing, Automotive, Business & Technologies, CPG & Retail, Vertical Industry


We live in a time of uncertainty, not unpredictability. Especially when a business finds itself on an undefined journey with an unclear destinationwhether caused by internal events or the world at largehaving plans to deal with a range of outcomes increases the odds of success. Or, at least enduring the least amount of damage. Managing an organization in uncertain times is always hard, but...

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Topics: Machine Learning, Office of Finance, Supply Chain Planning, Business Planning, Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, Artificial intelligence, digital finance, Generative AI


Since a majority of today’s workforce wasn’t around in the 1990s, it’s worth noting that “business process reengineering” was all the rage. The purpose was to review, restructure and redesign core business processes to achieve substantial improvements in market and customer responsiveness, productivity, cycle times and quality. One reason for its popularity (beyond being a money spinner for...

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Topics: Product Information Management, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Continuous Supply Chain & ERP


Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is trending toward becoming more strategic in product-centric companies through the end of the decade. The purpose of S&OP has grown in importance. Since the mid-teens, the trade and economic environment has become less benign and more unpredictable, forcing many enterprises to redesign their supply chains for resiliency while still surmounting the dual...

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Topics: Continuous Planning, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, Continuous Supply Chain & ERP


The recent launch of the AI Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 corporations and research institutions engaged in artificial intelligence (AI) development (including AMD, CERN, Cornell University, Dell Technologies, IBM, Intel, Linux Foundation, Meta, NASA, Oracle, ServiceNow and Sony Group), aims to achieve the following objectives:

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Topics: Office of Finance, Business Planning, Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Continuous Supply Chain & ERP


Board offers a platform that enables financial planning and analysis (FP&A) groups to forecast, plan, budget, analyze and report, using a consistent set of data from across the business to speed these processes, improve forecast and planning accuracy, and accelerate analysis and reporting. Board was categorized as an Exemplary Vendor in our Ventana Research Business Planning Value Index, with...

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Topics: Office of Finance, Continuous Planning, Business Planning, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning


We added purchasing, sourcing and payments to our core Office of Finance focus areas this year to reflect new and important opportunities to use technology to gain effectiveness through greater efficiency. Technology continues to lubricate the wheels of commerce, aided by a financial services sector that is constantly innovating, responding to market-driven opportunities to reduce costs, increase...

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Topics: Product Information Management, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Continuous Supply Chain & ERP


As we celebrate the first half of what seems to be the year of generative artificial intelligence, with an apparently unlimited discussion of use cases and bogeymen, my attention is turning to the very mundane question of costs. Specifically, how costs incurred – through investment and operation – will be distributed along the value chain and how this will affect the demand for AI ‒ by whom and...

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Topics: Office of Finance, Continuous Planning, Business Planning, Enterprise Resource Planning, natural language processing, AI and Machine Learning, Continuous Supply Chain & ERP


Organizations engage in collaborative supply chain planning in order to have more accurate, timely and actionable information, including forecasts and stock-on-hand. The objective is to achieve lower costs and reduce risk while ensuring order fulfillment to achieve optimal supplier and customer relationships. Unfortunately, our research shows that that few companies manage collaboration well in...

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Topics: Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, Continuous Supply Chain & ERP


In early 2019, I first wrote about the escalating strategic challenges facing organizations resulting from the decade-long dismantling of the liberal global trade environment and the shift to more restrictive regimes. Supply chain management was upended in 2020 as a series of extraordinary events, especially the pandemic-induced supply chain shocks, compounded the tactical challenges facing...

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Topics: Continuous Planning, Business Planning, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, Continuous Supply Chain & ERP


We’ve experienced an unusual, decades-long monetary policy in the developed world that emphasized interest rate repression as well as supply chain practices designed for lowest cost. This has produced a generation of chief financial officers likely unprepared to address the impact of fundamental changes now shaping a new, technology-driven approach to working capital optimization. Today’s CFOs...

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Topics: Office of Finance, Enterprise Resource Planning, continuous supply chain


Early last December, just before ChatGPT became the new, bright, shiny object, The Economist magazine ran a story proclaiming that we had finally arrived at the age of boring artificial intelligence (AI). From my perspective, it’s unfortunate that didn’t last and that AI has been relegated back to the buzzword league. AI will be an increasingly important feature of business software through the...

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Topics: Office of Finance, Business Intelligence, Business Planning, Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, natural language processing, continuous supply chain, AI and Machine Learning


The cloud has come to dominate many business software categories, but until recently, enterprise resource planning for manufacturing and product-focused organizations has been a notable laggard. Cloud-based systems can be less costly to operate, perform better, be more secure and shift maintenance and update chores from the IT department to the vendor, freeing IT teams to concentrate on more...

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Topics: Office of Finance, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, continuous supply chain


Ventana Research recently announced its 2023 research agenda for Operations and Supply Chain, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for nearly two decades to help organizations across industries derive optimal value and improved outcomes from business technology.

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Topics: Continuous Planning, Product Information Management, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, continuous supply chain, Property Technology, Supplier Relationship Management


Ventana Research uses the term “data pantry” to describe a method of data storage (and the technology and process blueprint for its construction) created for a specific set of users and use cases in business-focused software. It’s a pantry because all the data one needs is readily available and easily accessible, with labels that are immediately recognized and understood by the users of the...

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Topics: Continuous Planning, Business Intelligence, Data Management, Business Planning, Data, Financial Performance Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, continuous supply chain, data operations, Streaming Data Events, Analytics and Data, AI and Machine Learning


Kinaxis recently announced it has acquired a Netherlands-based company, MPO, a cloud-based software offering that orchestrates multiparty supply chain execution. The combination is designed to enable Kinaxis to extend its concurrent planning platform to handle core elements of supply chain execution. Kinaxis acquired all the shares of MPO for approximately US$45 million, with some of the final...

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Topics: Business Intelligence, Business Planning, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, continuous supply chain, AI and Machine Learning


Kinaxis is a sales and operation planning software company headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. Its RapidResponse is an S&OP platform for concurrent planning, designed to integrate an organization’s supply chain planning silos, accelerate planning cycles and optimize supply chain execution to match customer demand.

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Topics: Continuous Planning, Business Planning, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, continuous supply chain


I first wrote about a new era of trade a few years ago to make the point that the period of optimizing supply chains for the lowest cost was over, and that companies needed to redesign them to achieve greater resiliency. That observation proved correct. Now we are hearing about “the end of globalization,” a hyperbolic phrase describing the effects of ongoing changes to the international political...

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Topics: Continuous Planning, Business Planning, Financial Performance Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, continuous supply chain


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