SaaS drives the EDI and Supply Chain Software Market…

Once considered heretics, SaaS Supply Chain Management and EDI companies are now considered hot property due to a recent report published by ARC.


The report highlights that the Supply Chain Integration and Management market has grown at a 7 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), since 2005. The growth rate would have been much higher though were it not for the global economic downturn that started pinching in 2008 and hit with full force in 2009. During that time frame however, SaaS based Supply Chain and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) solutions grew by a CAGR in excess of 20 percent.

To clarify, the SCM market includes Supply Chain Execution —production, warehouse, and transportation management — as well as Supply Chain Planning — strategic, manufacturing, and inventory planning.

“Historically, SaaS has enjoyed a significant market presence only in the transportation management market,” according to Steve Banker, Service Director for SCM at the ARC Advisory Group, “but that is changing. SaaS solutions will grow significantly faster than traditional software and services.” Steve is the principal author of ARC’s “Supply Chain Management Worldwide Outlook: Market Analysis and Forecast through 2014”.

The Emergence of SaaS in the SCM Market
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can encompass either multitenant solutions or hosted solutions particular to an individual customer. The Transportation Management Systems (TMS) market is the only SCE market where SaaS is well entrenched. In TMS, SaaS solutions win not just because of lower price points, but also because they leverage the power of the network. Transportation optimization has little value if companies can’t successfully tender the optimized loads. Networked SaaS TMS solutions have a key advantage in on-boarding new carriers and in the data quality of the messaging with those carriers.

But in 2008, we saw SaaS emerge in the production management and supply chain planning markets. In 2009, SaaS made significant progress in the warehouse management systems market.

Ten years ago ARC began referring to production management systems as “Collaborative Production Management.” This reflected our belief that production management was not just about better processes at an individual factory. That for factories to operate well they needed to collaborate with suppliers and customers, that the network of factories needed to synchronize their work, and that increasingly that network would be composed of not just company owned factories but factories run contract manufacturing partners. In WMS, network centric solutions are emerging, that potential exists in production management as well.

Perceptant, a SaaS Supply Chain and EDI Solutions Company
Perceptant is a leading provider of fully-managed SaaS solutions that drive Supply Chain Execution, Integration and Collaboration. Our hosted, on-demand service encapsulates over 20 years experience in process improvement, inefficiency removal and cost reduction. Perceptant has its headquarters in Sheffield, Yorkshire, UK.