Demand management systems today have moved beyond the narrow concept of statistical forecasting to encompass both global and cross enterprise trading partner processes. In addition, the real-time nature of today’s business requires that rapid feedback from markets and adjustments to demand assumptions are propagated through the supply chain to improve delivery and cost performance. Demand management means identifying and creating demand (marketing, merchandising, and promoting), modeling (forecasting, pricing, and life cycle planning), and collaborating (communicate, simulate, and create consensus) with the network of trading partners. It also means evaluating results and creating learning cycles where the market, including geographic, demographic, and economic assumptions are evaluated and improved upon to constantly improve the performance of the chain.

Considering some of the largest corporations in the world actually make not only their profit margins, but also form a two-to-ten year customer relationship from the service component of their business, the importance of service planning and management cannot be overlooked. As we know, customers may not buy from a firm again--regardless of the attractiveness of the product--if the service component of the relationship is not optimal. Service parts planning is a module designed to enable the creation of service centers, depots, and the positioning of the appropriate inventory and workforce capacity to meet outbound customer service requirements. This module can be a stand-alone software solution, a web-based network solution, or a module within a service and maintenance solution. It can integrate with service contract and maintenance agreement systems as well as maintenance systems--but it is not intended to play the role of those solutions.  There is significant complexity on positioning service parts to support customers and meet service-level targets. The business benefits are significant both in cost management and customer satisfaction.

Transportation involves many different parties within and outside a company who are required to routinely share information and ideas. A fully functional transportation management system should provide the basic components of a shared information system to support: 

- Content such as rates, routes, roles, and contracts at inter-enterprise generic levels

- Commerce to support and create transaction sets, documents, and information exchanged to facilitate the booking, execution, and settlement of transportation movements on an "any-to-any" level

- Collaboration for real-time and interactive exchange between multiple parties, irrespective of roles

The data model and data dictionary of the TMS should thus support a wide and diverse range of interactions. The system should also facilitate the exchange of data with a series of external and internal applications, as well as provide user-level tools and utilities. The combination of these robust system infrastructures and collaborative applications should enable the user to perform all necessary functions involved in the planning, execution, and analysis of transportation movements.

A distributed order management system is a unique supply chain application. Generally it cannot function as a stand-alone solution but depends on integration with other systems to perform its functions. It is as much a technology as an application. Why would a firm engage in the implementation of such a solution? Because, today's order execution and fulfillment requires integration across multiple enterprises. Thus, firms need to implement software that enables business processes and data integration in heterogeneous business and systems environments.

This group of criteria defines the technical architecture of the product as well as the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. Criteria include product and application architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support and integration capabilities. Relative to the other evaluation criteria, best practice selections place a lower relative importance on the product technology criterion. This apparently lower importance is deceptive because the product technology usually houses the majority of the selecting organization's mandatory criteria, which generally include server, client, protocol and database support, application scalability, and other architectural capabilities. The definition of mandatory criteria within this set often allows the client to quickly narrow the long list of potential vendors to a short list of applicable solutions that pass muster relative to the most basic mandatory selection criteria.

Supply Chain Analytics encompases both Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) and Supply Chain Optimization (SCO). This software allows individuals within the supply chain network to detect if their are problems within the processes and nodes within the supply chain by giving users "what-if" analysis within the SCEM and also to allow users to know how to optimize either the whole supply chain, inventory or transportation routes and loads.

Supply Chain Analytics also encompases supply chain planning, where individuals within the supply chain can plan events within the supply chain, whether this be a pure distribution operation, a manufacturing operation where goods are sources or a mix of both distribution and manufacturing.