Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

Ventana Research recently announced its 2020 research agenda for operations and the supply chain, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for nearly two decades to help organizations across industries derive optimal value from business technology and improve outcomes. Organizations must shift their focus on technology investments to include not just operational productivity but the efficiency of the processes that impact customers’ and workers’ experiences.

To help, we craft our research agenda using our firm’s expertise on business requirements and our knowledge of technology vendors and products. Through our continuous market research, we offer insights and best practices to help both the lines of business and IT as well as insights across industry verticals that will help any organization reach its maximum potential.

We have in 2020 a new focus on price and revenue management to help organizations across industries address the strategy, planning and execution of pricing policies. These processes require specific technology — pricing optimization for managing B2C models, for example, and configure-price-quote (CPQ) to enable adjusting pricing based on the configuration of products as is most often found in B2B-focused organizations. But for many, the chief issue is establishing and maintaining process consistency in managing price books across sales force automation (SFA), accounting and ERP systems to commerce and channel-based systems. Operations and the supply chain should be a chief concern for any organization looking to optimize product investments and profitability.

The operations and supply chain of an organization are responsible for the efficient

development and delivery of products and services. Our operations and supply chain expertise includes six topic areas: continuous planning; the continuous supply chain; ERP; price and revenue management; product information management; and work experience management.

Continuous Planning

Continuous planning uses technology to support rapid collaborative review and action on plans regardless of review cycle frequency. Businesses must use technology to make planning more agile and easier as cloud computing and in-memory processing are making shorter enterprise planning and review cycles feasible. Organizations this year will increasingly find that they must shift from silo-based planning to continuous planning to achieve better results. We are conducting benchmark and value index research in 2020 to identify best practices and assess and rate technology vendors’ potential to help meet emerging business planning needs.

The Continuous Supply Chain

The continuous supply chain is an approach that intelligently automates interactions on the supply chain to generate actionable information. Digital technologies are advancing supply chain potential for improved performance. Optimizing engagement in the supply chain increases an organization’s potential to achieve desired outcomes. However, most organizations require new investments that automate and optimize supply chain actions. Technology is available that streamlines product lifecycle management (PLM) as are manufacturing and service applications to ensure optimal execution. We will conduct new benchmark research in 2020 to identify best practices to optimize the supply chain.

Enterprise Resource Planning

ERP technology is evolving to enable a “continuous supply chain,” a more engaged and forward-looking management approach for manufacturing and services industries. ERP in the cloud advances processes for service and supply chains and their efficiency. ERP also increasingly includes technologies such as collaboration and robotic automation that enable digital transformation and improve the operational efficiency of the business. We will conduct new benchmark research in 2020 to identify best practices that will help organizations better meet emerging ERP needs.

Pricing and Revenue Management

Pricing and revenue management enables sustainable margin improvement in B2B transactions by embedding analytics into the sales process. B2B pricing and revenue management is becoming mainstream and increasingly accessible; refining analytics and providing end-to-end management makes software more usable. Pricing and revenue management is a critical cross-departmental responsibility that includes marketing, sales and finance organizations. Improving these processes and enabling technologies increasingly is a way for these organizations to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. We will conduct new benchmark and value index research in 2020 to identify best practices and assess and rate technology vendors’ potential to help meet emerging pricing and revenue management needs.

Product Information Management

Product information management is technology that provides the ability to improve product experiences by enabling consistent management of product and related information used in business processes and by consumers. Organizations are modernizing PIM to support a superior digital experience across supply chain operations and the product lifecycle and to enable more effective marketing. The transition to the cloud will speed the return on products’ value and heighten the imperative organizations face to provide excellent product experiences. Organizations also face pressure to take advantage of machine learning and robotic process automation; these technologies improve product information quality by highlighting issues and opportunities for improvement. We will conduct new benchmark research on product experience management and will publish a Value Index in 2020 to identify best practices and assess and rate technology vendors’ potential to help meet emerging product needs.

Work Experience Management

Work experience management is a portfolio of technologies to help organizations more effectively engage its workforce and resources. This includes methods to optimize resources and processes to improve accountability and efficiency and better achieve desired outcomes. New technology approaches are streamlining tasks and enabling better utilization of resources to better support engagement in work and improve how it is conducted. We will conduct new Dynamic Insights research on work experience management in 2020 to identify best practices that can guide improvement.

Every organization, no matter the size of its workforce or revenue, has an opportunity to significantly improve its operations and supply chain experience with underlying processes and digital technologies that can have an immediate impact on top- and bottom-line results. Determining a successful path forward in 2020 requires an effective strategy and knowledge of the digital technology you need to improve or add to the existing portfolio of investments for operations and supply chain.

Subscribe to our community to keep up to date on our research efforts in 2020 and come to our operations and supply chain expertise and topic areas to see the detailed agenda and continuously updated 90-day calendar as well as more research facts and best practices.

Regards,
Mark Smith