This week, SAP was named a Leader in IDC MarketScape reports for Cloud-Enabled Operational ERP and Cloud-Enabled Manufacturing ERP, recognizing the competitive strength and business value to customers of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
The IDC MarketScapes considered criteria important to companies who make products and see technology as both a competitive differentiator and an innovation accelerator.
Manufacturers are benefiting from the incorporation of innovative digital technologies into their ERP solutions. This requires the greater speed, agility, and flexibility that Cloud ERP applications provide, particularly those bolstered by new capabilities through IoT, big data and analytics, mobility, and augmented/virtual reality.
These innovations place greater demand on ERP investments to deliver value through optimization across the supply chain, production, and logistics areas, and extend into service technologies to maximize asset performance and increase customer satisfaction.
IoT is becoming pervasive throughout manufacturing value chains, with ongoing activity across three primary use case categories—smart manufacturing, connected supply chain, and connected products/services—with the biggest opportunity for transformation coming from the products/services side.
The two IDC MarketScape reports examine the ability of applications to manage multiple business and technology dimensions, including:
- Resiliency/agility: Balancing cost, quality, throughput, and agility, especially when faced with supply/labor shortages
- Product/service mix: To avoid commoditization, companies are seeking to differentiate through new value-added services to supplement their traditional product offerings
- Customer experience: Deep collaboration and understanding needs are evolving to require customization of products and easy ways for buyers to research, shop, and order on their own terms and time
- Managing the talent/skills gap: The manufacturing industry is feeling the pressure of labor shortages and the need to maximize the productivity of a limited workforce
- Sustainability: Sustainable manufacturing is not just a marketing and brand discussion; organizations need to use, manage, and maintain sustainability data as part of their decisions to truly drive sustainable operations
- Modular and integrated systems: Many organizations are focused on modular systems strategy allowing them to use deep native integration on a big data platform, and allow integration, expansion, and easy reporting
- Anywhere, anytime access: Global manufacturers look to cloud ERP to allow global operation and manage through continual disruption
- Remote and autonomous tasks: Greater automation of tasks provides health, safety, and productivity benefits through factory automation, warehouse robotics, mobile workforce empowerment, remote virtual assistance, and augmented technician guidance.
- Highly configurable cloud ERP applications: Provide for artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML)
To view the report excerpts: IDC MarketScape Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Manufacturing ERP Applications 2022 Vendor Assessme... (Doc #US49047922, May 2022) and IDC MarketScape Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Operational ERP Applications 2022 Vendor Assessment (Doc #US46733721, May 2022)
