Mid-market enterprise application vendor CDC Software officially announced its latest supply chain management offering today. OnePlan 5.0, available from CDC subsidiary Ross Systems, seeks to smooth the production planning and scheduling process via an on-demand software tool.
When it comes to supply chain planning, a critical part of the equation for any company involves the scheduling of its production processes. Given the fickleness of the supply chain, plans can change on a dime, and manufacturers must be able to quickly adjust their production processes to synch with those fluctuations.
That is where OnePlan 5.0 proves its mettle, according to Chris Taunton, product manager for supply chain product planning at CDC Software. The three main components of the OnePlan suite are its scheduling capabilities, a set of KPIs that can plot a company's progress toward goals, and an alerting system for production changes.
Specifically, the planning and scheduling engine determines what products can be made when; configurable KPIs allow a company to set up performance targets and monitor progress against those targets; and the alerting system ensures that when a change is made in the system, all the affected parties are notified that, for instance, the job quantity planned for line three just increased by 5,000, Taunton said.
"Most scheduling systems are designed primarily for a single user," Taunton said, "but obviously there are lots of other people involved in the whole scheduling process." They include materials managers, purchasers, and line operators within the manufacturer's operation, plus outside parties such as independent suppliers, co-packers, or subcontractors that factor prominently in the production process.
"The system is role-enabled," Taunton explained, "so if your role is a material manager or a purchasing manager, you have different views and access to the data than if you're a production scheduler." Those views are delivered via a Web browser, while the data and applications that form the infrastructure of the system are housed off site at Ross Systems' data center.
The messaging system relies mainly on e-mail, Taunton said. If a production manager updates the schedule, a pre-defined list of co-workers receives an e-mail notification of the update so they can adjust their activities accordingly.
The OnePlan product was originally built to connect to legacy ERP systems. It has developed to become "ERP agnostic," in the words of Taunton, working with systems from vendors such as Oracle, SAP, and Ross, as well as with custom-built applications.
OnePlan 5.0 can pull the data from a manufacturer's ERP system through one of three methods, he noted -- timed, batch, or polled -- and does so primarily through the use of XML coding.
Taunton said future releases of OnePlan will typically follow every four to six months, with deeper functionality featured in each. One example of that greater depth in the latest release, he noted, is the ability to model the byproduct of a manufacturing process. Process manufacturers, he said, often create byproduct during processing, and now OnePlan can help them manage this during the planning stage as well, Taunton said.
Company officials said that Ross has used the on-demand delivery model to cut down on the time it takes for customers to deploy this kind of product. Taunton said an average implementation of OnePlan takes six to 10 weeks. Typically, there is a Ross representative on site to facilitate the process, which includes about two days of training.
Scot McLeod, senior vice president of global marketing and corporate communications at CDC Software, estimated the average startup fee for a OnePlan implementation at $25,000, but stressed that the cost varies depending on the breadth of the company's implementation.
Similarly, McLeod said, the monthly subscription average of approximately $5,000 depends on the company's intended use of the OnePlan product.
Ross Systems is a business unit of CDC Software, which itself is the business applications arm of CDC Corp. (Hong Kong). OnePlan's lineage is slightly more direct than that of its corporate parent. Originally designed by a small supply chain planning company named JRG -- one of Managing Automation's Companies to Watch in 2005 -- OnePlan was added to Ross Systems' product portfolio when CDC acquired JRG earlier this year.
Asked whether the shift to on-demand offerings was to blame for CDC's recent second quarter fall-off in license revenue, McLeod maintained that CDC's expectations called for growth in both revenue lines. He noted that the year-over-year drop in license revenue of over 6% was largely due to a surprisingly healthy quarter in 2005, when two "unusually large" deals closed and gave CDC immediate revenue recognition.