My last year have been filled of products, and some of them had a obvious fit in the system map in almost any company. Advanced planning systems has developed a lot in the last years, the product that Kineticsware have (KAPS) is a new generation advanced planning system, that handles the input information in a new way, and uses new algorithms to speed up the calculations, it has a great interface to present the information to the end user. It also gives the posibility to to "What if" scenarios because it have the new way of doing the calculations that gives the speed.
Another very interesting functional area that I personally had not spent a lot of thoughs of is the Trade Promotion Management. After reading research from companies like AMR, AT Kerney, SAP, Kineticsware, and Infosys it is obvious that this area have need for end to end solutions. There are some products out on the market that claims to have the holistic view of the challange. I am sure that many of the big consultant firms, like EDS, can provide expertise in the area but with the area being quite new to the product companies (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle …) the interesting thing here is that new products have the possibility to position themself in the market, and make a big difference. So … what is Trade Promotion Management? TPM is the business process of managing incentives between manufacturer and retailer to improve the sales of a product. That can at first sound quite easy, right? But when you start to dig into the problem space you soon find that it is more complex to get right than you imagined in the beginning. And that insight is usually the first sign of that some automated support might be good to have. Do everyone need a new product? No of course not, but the market now offers products for companies in every size from the small to the large enterprises. When scanning the market for good solutions I think it is important to find a solution that gives the functionality that you need, and can grow with your business. It might be the correct thing to go for SAP if you have the strategy of using SAP solutions, but a Microsoft solution will be a extremly good alternative for many companies. There are of course other vendors that should be evaluated, but do not forget to take things like stability, scalability and other non-functional aspects into consideration as well as the functionality.
The ROI of implementing automated support of the TPM activities is very often very good, but do not forget to apply som organisational changes when you are doing it also so that you actually use the new features. And the change of business processes is not only in the sales and marketing department … it will affect more parts of your business. I think that a TPM solution can be the innovation that often is talked about in BPR that is needed to lift the company performance to a new level. If/when you get that advantage of the solution it is also possible to repeat the activity and continue to be successful.
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