We issued a news release today, in light of JDA’s acquisition of i2 Technologies, announcing a new incentive program to current i2 customers.

Our director of product marketing, Trevor Miles, wrote about the acquisition recently here, as have many in the industry before and since.  Bob Parker at Manufacturing Insights is one example.

In addressing the question of how buyers should approach their investment roadmap given this acquisition, Bob believes “the answer lies in whether JDA will satisfy the pent up needs of the installed base or ride out the maintenance stream until customers move on.”  I really wonder how many i2 customers will want to live in such limbo?

Furthermore, Bob advises current i2 customers to “…have a replacement plan devised as soon as possible…thinking through the alternatives and having contingency actions ready is wise.”  I agree, and in fact I would argue that i2 customers should question if they want to put themselves in such a passive and reactive position, waiting for others to make the decisions for them. (See Bob’s full article here.  This is what Bob had to say about Kinaxis –  “Kinaxis: This company is doing a great job in supplier intensive planning and execution in industries like consumer electronics and aerospace.”)

Meanwhile, vendors are looking to offer safe passage programs or similar (of which, admittedly we are one).  One supply chain planning (SCP) provider is offering their “next-generation supply chain planning applications that are the equivalent to previously owned i2 products.”  In these challenging times, my gut tells me that people won’t settle for the equivalent. 

Our suggestion to i2 customers is to turn this time of uncertainty into a time of opportunity… to do something different and get more.  i2 customers really need to evaluate their “pent up” needs and look for a solution that can best address them, and in a most cost-effective, low-risk,  time-efficient way.  I try to avoid a lot of self-promotion on this blog, but in this case I want to be sure that everyone knows what we can offer here as we have a number of customers that have made the switch.

Casio is a perfect example of a customer of ours that installed i2 (and took 3 years to do it), only to find that the performance results achieved were far below targets, and that it failed to address changes in demand and supply effectively so users still had to deal with these manually.  Several other customers, Toshiba as one example, evaluated i2 and decided to go with RapidResponse.  There is a good article here on Toshiba – one quote says it all – “The company looked at several other solutions (including i2), but found that nothing provided the capabilities that RapidResponse did – it was unique in the value proposition it could offer.”

We offer a one-to-many value proposition, providing a single integrated on-demand service that solves a variety of supply chain problems (which can replace upwards of seven i2 modules, incidentally).   There is a real difference between RapidResponse and traditional planning systems, namely:

RapidResponse
Capitalized on human judgment
1000’s of daily users/experts
Plan-Monitor-Respond
Typical deployment – 14 weeks
On-demand
One solution – many applications

Legacy Planning Systems
Black-box optimization
1-5 expert users
Plan only (assumes static world)
Lengthy – often promised  benefits never entirely realized
On-premise (significant IT resources)
Multiple planning tools + Excel hell

Food for thought anyway….

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Tags: On-demand (SaaS), Supply chain planning
Posted in General News
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