Why The Largest Supply Chain Vendors are Small in Supply Chain Planning
Executive Summary
- The largest software vendors tend to have small supply chain planning products.
- We cover why this is.
Introduction
It was curious to find the list of supply chain vendors as published by Modern Materials Handling magazine.
Largest Supply Chain Vendors by Revenues
| Supplier | 2015 Revenue | 2016 Revenue | Receives a Large Percentage of Income from Supply Chain Planning | Rated Well by Brightwork |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coupa | 72.4 | 114.3 | Never Evaluated | |
| SAP | 2,666.80 | 2,932.40 | No | |
| Oracle | 1,447.80 | 1,552.90 | No | |
| JDA Software | 467.8 | 475.9 | Yes (only one application) | |
| Infor Global Solutions | 105.5 | 243.3 | Yes | |
| Manhattan Associates | 209.3 | 218.8 | Never Evaluated | |
| Epicor | 162.1 | 191.6 | No | |
| Descartes Systems Group | 145.3 | 159.2 | Never Evaluated | |
| HighJump | 129.7 | 134.9 | Never Evaluated | |
| Basware | 112.6 | 122.3 | Never Evaluated | |
| GEP | 55 | 63.3 | Never Evaluated | |
| IBM | 126.6 | 112 | Never Evaluated | |
| PTC | 105.8 | 104.6 | Never Evaluated | |
| Dassault Systemes | 74.9 | 92.9 | Never Evaluated | |
| BluJay | 76.6 | 85.8 | Never Evaluated | |
| Jaggaer | 82.2 | 84 | Never Evaluated | |
| Kinaxis | 66.3 | 82.8 | Never Evaluated | |
| Perfect Commerce | 44.5 | 72 | Never Evaluated | |
| e2open | 57.7 | 69.8 | Never Evaluated | |
| Zycus | 49.4 | 65 | Never Evaluated |
* Many of the vendors on the list are coded as not evaluated because Brightwork Research & Analysis does not evaluate procurement/spend vendors, warehouse management vendors, or transportation management vendors.
Observations of the List
Things that stood out to us are the following:
The Limited Number of Vendors that Receive Income from Planning
It was curious that 0nly the vendors, JDA Software, E2Open, and Kinaxis receive either a primary or a substantial amount of their revenues from supply planning.
The other vendors are either ERP vendors, spend/sourcing vendors, or focus on warehousing and transportation. These areas have some planning aspects but tend to be far more execution-oriented in nature.
This shows that the core supply chain planning space (demand, supply, and production) planning is far smaller than we would have anticipated. SAP receives a decent amount of money from their supply chain planning applications, but their offerings are not rated well by us.
Fragmented Market
This shows how fragmented the market is for supply chain planning. There are so many vendors that we have rated highly (like Planet Together and DemandWorks) that are far away from breaking into this $50 revenue club.
Major Supply Chain Planning Vendors Not on the List
- A major vendor in the area not on the list is Logility, which is around $26 million to $27 million in yearly revenues.
- ToolsGroup is another prominent vendor in the supply chain planning space because they are private; they do not report revenues.
Many other vendors that are entirely SaaS-based, like Lokad, Slimstock, etc., have yet to reach scale.
The Fastest Growing Supply Chain Vendors
The fastest-growing vendors are procurement/spend management, lead by Coupa, Zycus, and Perfect Procurement. All the fastest-growing vendors on the list are either in procurement/spend management or are Infor — which, due to an infusion from the Koch Brothers, had gone on an acquisition spree. ERP vendors purchasing advanced planning applications usually do not end well.
The fastest-growing vendor of those that perform supply chain planning is Kinaxis.
The Worst Website
The worst website has to be Perfect Commerce. Perfect Commerce has roughly the same site volume as Brightwork Research & Analysis but did $72 million in business in 2016!
Furthermore, Perfect Commerce’s content is so bad; it deserves less than the volume it receives. This demonstrates that you don’t need a competent website to be one of the fastest-growing companies in their space.
Conclusion
One of our higher-level observations is that there are still many areas of supply chain planning that are not addressed by software of any size. Since i2 Technologies and Manugistics declined in 2001, there has been no vendor to ignite people’s imaginations anything like these vendors and focus attention on supply chain planning.