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Supply chains are becoming more and more global, which implies a higher degree of complexity in their development and management.

One key activity at the base of any supply chain is the ability to forecast and fulfill the demand for goods or services. In order to do so, companies serve their selves with IT systems that, despite the current and very popular “digital transformation” are still manual or built on antiquated software.

McKinsey in one of its latest surveys interviewed several global supply chain leaders in order to better understand which software companies are currently using to manage their supply chains.

The data collected through the survey reported that companies are rarely using a single software to manage their supply chain but are adopting different ones depending on the function.

The survey revealed that most of the functions are held through Excel spreadsheets by employees (73%) while more than a half have reported being using SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (53%) which is followed by SAP Integrated Business planning (20%), E2Open another end-to-end cloud-based supply chain software. The less used are reported to be Blue Yonder/JDA and in-house software (both at 13%)¹.

As the collected data reports, companies are still relying mostly on Excel to manage their process. What are in your experience the main reasons for this choice?

1 Respondents to the survey could reply by choosing more than one option.