A new study benchmarking the supply chain application priorities and strategies of over 150 enterprises in October and November of 2010, reveals that top performing companies have experienced significant improvement when it comes to collaborative processes. However filtering the results based on those companies that have implemented Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions for collaboration, reveals that these subset of companies have greater collaboration capabilities than lower performing companies.
"Companies using SaaS are able to more effectively collaborate with customers. This ensures that they will continue moving towards integrated demand-supply networks. This trend is bolstered by the rising importance of this process for succeeding in the multi-enterprise supply chain, especially in difficult economic times. Integrating trading partner data is not an easy task -- it requires a foundation of electronic connectivity with the partners. Early adopters of visibility and collaboration technologies have been able to use these systems to gather and manage the supply chain partner data," explained Nari Viswanathan, Vice President and Principal Analyst of Supply Chain Management at Aberdeen, which presented the study.
Even though SaaS has been proven to provide companies with a competitive advantage in areas that require multi-enterprise collaboration, like B2B integration and customer/supplier collaboration, there is room for SaaS usage to grow. In fact, only 42% of top companies indicate that their supply chain organizations have a commitment towards outsourcing an application. Specifically only 30% of top companies indicate that their supply chain organization supports SaaS based solutions. This indicates that the resistance towards the adoption of SaaS solutions is still the case across the marketplace.
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