Kinaxis Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Sales and Operations Planning System of Differentiation

It is with great pride that we announce Kinaxis® has been placed in the Leaders quadrant of the recently published Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales and Operations Planning Systems of Differentiation. Gartner defines a sales and operations planning (S&OP) System of Differentiation (SOD) as a software solution that supports a Stage 4 or higher maturity S&OP process.

According to the report, "Leaders have a strong vision for their S&OP SOD capabilities. They recognize the role they will need to play in enabling the move toward multienterprise horizontal planning allied with vertical integration that links strategy to operations and execution. They are looking at developing analytics to support probability-focused end-to-end predictive and prescriptive analytics to support profitability trade-offs and supply chain design and configuration capability.”¹

Because of our unique ability to provide concurrent planning, Kinaxis RapidResponse® is an ideal solution to take companies through the various stages of S&OP maturity. We believe the next revolution in supply chain performance can only be achieved by realizing the speed of cross-functional decision making. As today’s press release indicated, our goal is to advance our customers’ S&OP processes from early stages through to Stage 4, and beyond, over time by taking advantage of all full capabilities in our single product. Ultimately, with a sales and operations planning system of differentiation, we believe companies should achieve:

• tighter integration between supply chain and the commercial organization
• tight alignment of S&OE meetings with the midterm plan generated in the monthly S&OP meetings in order to support profitability-based short-term trade-offs
• consistent metrics considering the internal and external trade-offs required across the extended supply chain
• successful management of the trade-offs in the midterm planning horizon within the S&OP process, covering the three to 12 month terms and moving beyond the current quarter
• synchronization of the cycle of the S&OP process and the time horizon with the annual business plan and budget cycle

Managing S&OP from a single application enables companies to make better tradeoffs across competing metrics quickly and to make value-based decisions for the enterprise collaboratively – both at the time of plan development and when the S&OP guidance is violated due to unplanned events. Find out more about our S&OP solution and the outcomes Kinaxis customers have realized with RapidResponse. You can view the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales and Operations Planning Systems of Differentiation report in its entirety here. ¹ Payne, T., Magic Quadrant for Sales and Operations Planning Systems of Differentiation, Gartner Inc., May 1, 2017

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