vermorel Aug 23, 2022 | flag
Close to three-quarters of supply-chain functions rely on the simplest method: spreadsheets. In addition, more than half use SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO), a popular but antiquated supply-chain-planning application that SAP introduced in 1998 and will stop supporting in 2027. The portion of APO users in certain industries is even higher—75 to 80 percent of all the automotive, retail, and chemical companies we polled.

This 3/4 estimate for the supply chain functions that rely only on spreadsheets feels right. This is also matching my experience. Furthermore, even when some kind of planning tool is present, the tool almost invariably relies on the alerts & exceptions design antipattern which ensures a very low productivity for every employee that touch the piece of software.

However, I disagree with process suggested for the vendor selection. More specifically, the section that outlines the suggested process for the client company:

A list of business requirements.
Clear evaluation criteria.
Two or three “must have” use cases.

Companies invariably do an exceedingly poor job at any of those three tasks which are exceedingly technology dependent. This process guarantees a bureaucratic selection which favors whoever can tick the most boxes in the RFP document. Bloatware is the enemy of good software.

There is a much simpler, faster and more importantly accurate way to proceed through a vendor-on-vendor assessment:
https://tv.lokad.com/journal/2021/3/31/adversarial-market-research-for-enterprise-software/