OM Partners Review

An Independent Supply Chain Planning Software Review

OM Partners is a small Supply Chain Planning (SCP) software vendor headquartered in Belgium. With annual revenues of approximately $22.5 million, OM Partners is not on the top ten revenue list for Supply Chain Planning software vendors; but, they are recognized as one of the few specialist leaders in Supply Chain Planning solutions for process (non-discrete product) manufacturing operations. OM Partners began in 1985 developing programs for doing math calculations. The company has grown to over 250 customers worldwide in paper, metal, plastic, glass, pharmaceutical, chemical, food & beverage and other process based industries.

To support their worldwide customer base, OM Partners has opened subsidiaries in France, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, USA and China, with a handful of external partnerships that include Capgemini, Accenture, Wipro and Logexsoft. With deep roots in academia, OM Partners partners with various universities to augment their research efforts in the field of Supply Chain Planning technologies.

OM Partners offers adaptable Supply Chain Planning software, complemented with consulting and support services to provide customers with complete supply chain management solutions. The company helps customers develop and design solutions for their current and future Supply Chain challenges. Analysis and prototyping are the basic tools used to help determine customer needs and recommend solutions. The supply chain planning problems that OM Partners takes on are complex, involving a large number of different options and sometimes an infinite number of solutions to consider. The company has distinguished itself as a top visionary solution in supply chain software by providing solutions that help companies with their detail planning, factoring in many variables, such as different market demands, needs of diverse customers, production of multiple products, supply chain assets and trading partner values.

OM Partners’ Supply Chain Offerings

It is important to point out that OM Partners supply chain software is designed for complex process manufacturing (manufacturing that works with formulas and recipes instead of a BOM). Many features important or critical to discrete manufacturing, wholesale and retail industries do not share similar system functionality with process manufacturing solutions. OMP is an unlikely supply chain software solution for companies that do not have process manufacturing operations.

Planning Solutions

OM Partners is recognized for their integrated detailed planning solutions for process manufacturing that covers S&OP, Distribution and Master Planning. To accommodate the different variables and many constraints impacting planning, OMP Plus provides special tables for planning, machine capacity, resources, orders and warehouse information. OMP’s Planner/Solver solution addresses medium to long term planning and integrates with S&OP and VMI planner solutions.

Demand Management

OM Partners demand management covers forecasting, promotion management, and product lifecycle management; however, OMP’s demand management is somewhat light or not as robust as other top tier supply chain planning vendors when it comes to data management and collaboration.

Planning and Demand Forecasting

Demand forecasting uses quantitative and qualitative methods, as do most contemporary forecasting software. The application includes statistical, seasonality, new products and safety stock calculations. Qualitative features make allowances for demand shaping activities and judgments on future demand. OM Partners software also provides tools to evaluate forecast accuracy so that analysts can continuously improve on their forecast. Other features include budgeting, current demand sensing, outlier detection, flexible forecast horizons, and hierarchical and aggregation structures.

Data Management

Provisions are made to capture demand shaping data at all levels of aggregation. Using their product lifecycle management, analysts can substitute demand data from existing products for new product introductions, and massage demand data for products being phased out.

Collaborative Demand Planning

OM Partners provides a product called Web Forecaster to enable collaborative forecasting with internal resources and trading partners. Both internal and web forecasts can be tracked separately.

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