Can Webplan Reconcile Planning and Execution?
Part One: Event Summary
P.J. Jakovljevic - June 30, 2004

Event Summary

The past two years or so have been an interesting if not a tumultuous period for the Ottawa, Canada-based, privately-held Webplan Corporation (www.webplan.com), which felt compelled to further refine its original supply chain planning (SCP) and business-to-business (B2B) collaboration value proposition. The vendor, which started in 1984 providing fast-acting manufacturing resource planning (MRP) applications to midsized companies, was formerly called Enterprise Planning Systems and prior to that, Advanced Planning Systems. In 1998, Webplan not only changed its name, but started to reposition its product offerings towards a broader, collaborative SCP suite. In the most recent soul-searching exercise, during which it replaced and reshuffled much of its former leadership, the vendor has refocused on highly actionable response management software (formerly referred to as operational performance management [OPM], a subset of broader corporate performance management [CPM] software, which is about communication and delivering actionable intelligence at the right time) for manufacturers and distributors, what it believes will be a growth market...