ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

Collaborative Supply Chain Forecasting Faces Serious Challenges

Posted by Robert Kugel on 16 September 2025

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...

Minimize Costs with Supply Chain Agility and AI

Posted by Robert Kugel on 26 August 2025

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...

AI Agents in the Supply Chain offer a Competitive Edge

Posted by Robert Kugel on 21 August 2025

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...

Sustainability: Global Complexity Requires Software for Compliance

Posted by Robert Kugel on 30 July 2025

ISG Software Research is expanding our ISG Buyers Guide™ coverage to include the topic of sustainability. Our buyers guide will focus on sustainability exclusively rather than the full spectrum of environmental, social and governance topics. One reason is that gathering, managing, analyzing and reporting environmental data under the various frameworks and statutes presents enterprises with...

Kinaxis Demonstrates Accessible AI-Enabled Supply Chains

Posted by Robert Kugel on 23 April 2025

I recently attended Kinaxis’ annual user group meeting, Kinexions. The most important theme of the event was the trifecta of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and agents. Supply chain planning and execution software are the business software domains that are going to be major beneficiaries of AI and agentic AI automation. However, they also are going to be two of the more...

Smart Manufacturing Increases Productivity and Resilience

Posted by Robert Kugel on 26 March 2024

Smart manufacturing is a strategic operating approach that aligns advanced manufacturing technology with system and process design principles to promote adaptability. It is a digital, event-driven, collaborative orchestration of physical and digital processes designed to increase productivity, efficiency, adaptability and resilience. These systems use technologies to coordinate the planning and...