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Leading Analyst Firm's Report Recognizes Symphony Metreo's Pricing and Profitability Capabilities as Important in Evolving Sales and Operations Planning Market
PALO ALTO, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- Symphony Metreo, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise pricing and operations management solutions, today announced its inclusion in AMR Research's "S&OP Technology Landscape: Evolution to Integrated Business Planning Is a Work in Progress"(1) report. The report reflects significant trends in the sales and operations planning (S&OP) market, and includes vendors such as Symphony Metreo whose solutions form the foundation of S&OP's evolution into the concept of integrated business planning.
According to AMR Research, "Traditionally, S&OP was viewed as a senior management decision-making process that ensured tactical plans in all business functions - sales, marketing, and demand and supply management - were aligned and loosely supported by the overall business plan. But recently it has evolved into the concept of integrated business planning, which is the process of constantly realigning decisions within these business functions as well as synchronizing with the strategic financial plans to create a consensus operational plan for supply and demand matching."
A key takeaway in the report states that, "S&OP technology must evolve beyond supply to demand matching in order to offer integrated business planning: 360-degree integration between supply, demand, financial goals and operational plans." As part of the report, AMR Research analyzed the vendor landscape, evaluating how different tools approached integrated business planning requirements across the following categories: business intelligence and performance management; supply chain planning; pricing and profitability; tactical demand fulfillment and S&OP pure play. Symphony Metreo was included in the pricing and profitability category, where S&OP applications emphasize the need for profitability planning and financial visibility. In this category, Symphony Metreo was the only vendor to participate in the report.
Symphony Metreo was positioned as having either "Competitive," "Strong" or "Differentiated" functionality in every category of the report, and was the only company to receive the classification of "Differentiated" in the "Develop operational plan" and "Conduct financial what-if analysis" categories.
"We view S&OP as a collection of technology-enabled, integrated business processes that are becoming increasingly essential to master in today's competitive business environment. The key focus areas within those processes of pricing, profitability, demand shaping and forecasting and supply chain require the kind of next generation S&OP solutions that we provide," said Tal Ball, CEO, Symphony Metreo, Inc. "There is a need to break down operational silos. No longer can supply chain functional areas remain focused solely on volume, such as units and quantity, without giving consideration to the financial impact of supply chain decisions. Organizations simply can't make good demand and supply decisions without considering the financial impacts to price and cost, which points to the important and growing need for functional integration and collaboration to close that gap."
Symphony Metreo's Finance Sales & Operations Planning solution, FS&OP Manager(TM), is a next generation solution for planning, forward-looking performance analysis, and decision management to continuously synchronize and align demand and supply. Using Symphony Metreo FS&OP Manager to incorporate integrated business planning principles, companies can achieve a more forward-looking, collaborative, cross-functional approach to decision-making to gain operational improvements and streamlined planning processes.
Symphony Metreo FS&OP Manager is designed to handle both units and dollars and enables the financial impact and analysis component of decisions so often missing from operations. As a result, all functions of the business can work from a single set of numbers, and see both the financial as well as the volume impact of their decisions across the business.
Symphony Metreo FS&OP Manager puts advanced analytics and modeling capabilities into the hands of operations decision-makers, allowing them to monitor performance in real time, model decisions in a collaborative process--with sales and marketing, supply chain, and finance--and execute decisions to internal systems with write-back capabilities.
Demonstrating Symphony Metreo's achievements in taking an integrated business planning approach to S&OP, the company has been recognized with a number of industry awards, including:
-- Symphony Metreo's FS&OP Manager is a 2008 CODiE Award Finalist in the Best Supply Chain Solution category.
-- Symphony Metreo customer Linksys, a Division of Cisco, was selected as a winner of the Managing Automation fourth annual Progressive Manufacturing 50 Awards.
-- Linksys also won the Ventana Research 2007 Performance Management Leadership Award for operational excellence in supply chain management. Based on its use of Symphony Metreo FS&OP Manager, Linksys improved business performance and was able to better manage inventory levels while decreasing the volatile demand on the rest of its supply chain.
For more information on Symphony Metreo and its role in the integrated business planning space, visit www.symphony-metreo.com.
About Symphony Metreo
Symphony Metreo helps organizations meet their financial goals of Revenue and Margin with innovative solutions that align and synchronize top-down planning with bottom-up execution by focusing on the strategic levers of Price, Volume and Cost. Symphony Metreo serves global enterprises with innovative award winning applications in the areas of Enterprise Pricing, Operations Management and Performance Management. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Symphony Metreo is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Symphony Technology Group, a $2.1 billion strategic holding company. For additional information, visit http://www.symphony-metreo.com.
(1)AMR Research, "S&OP Technology Landscape: Evolution to Integrated Business Planning Is a Work in Progress," by Noha Tohamy and William McNeil (April 2008)
Copyright (C) 2008 Symphony Metreo, Inc. All Rights Reserved. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders.
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