10 steps to evaluating and buying supply chain planning and optimisation software
Author : Adrian Wood, DELMIA
26 August 2025
The formula for calculating ROI
In today’s global economy, supply chain efficiency has become a game-changer for organisations striving to enhance operational performance and profitability.
Companies with logistics-intensive operations are increasingly turning to their supply chains as a source of cost savings and improved cash flow.
For decades, businesses have relied on enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) software to guide decision-making. However, these systems often provide backward-looking insights, failing to account for unique capabilities, assets, and future possibilities. Supply chain planning and optimisation (SCP&O) offers the forward-looking capabilities that companies need to address these challenges and uncover new profit opportunities.
Organisations across industries – from manufacturing to retail – have implemented SCP&O software to reduce inventory costs, improve on-time deliveries, optimise resources, and bolster overall resilience. Investing in SCP&O technology isn’t just a choice; it’s a strategic necessity for those looking to stay competitive. The process involves more than just choosing a product – it’s about finding a long-term partner for success.
Why choose SCP&O software?
Supply chain planning and optimisation software provides cutting-edge solutions beyond the scope of traditional ERP and SCM systems. With predictive analytics and optimisation capabilities, these tools help organisations to adapt to real-time changes, improve decision-making, and seize opportunities to streamline operations.
Benefits of supply chain planning & optimisation software:
• Improved decision-making – Predictive algorithms provide actionable insights and recommend optimal strategies
• Scalability – SCP&O solutions grow alongside your business, whether across regions or functions
• Operational resilience – These tools enable your business to quickly respond to disruptions, ensuring continuity during crises
The 10-step guide to choosing the right SCP&O software
Here is a roadmap to help you confidently evaluate and implement supply chain planning and optimisation software tailored to meet your organization’s demands.
1. Create the team
As your SCP&O investment will influence many areas of your business, you will want input regarding the functionality you need from key stakeholders in operations, manufacturing, planning, finance and IT – at a minimum. Inviting contributors from across the enterprise helps to ensure that all requirements are identified, all interdependencies are documented, and the probability of problem-free implementation is maximised.
The key is to include:
1. people who set your company’s business goals and determine how they are measured
2. people who execute the daily processes that drive those goals, and
3. executive sponsors for all functions
More specifically, the team should represent: planners, as they will be operating the system; financial analysts, as they will be evaluating its effectiveness; individuals whose jobs are directly affected by planners and schedulers; IT; and management.
2. Identify critical features
To optimise your supply chain planning and operations (SCP&O), start by evaluating your organisation’s current processes, goals, and unique characteristics. Identify key decisions, metrics, and processes that align with your objectives, such as on-time delivery or manufacturing quality control, and determine critical features needed in an SCP&O solution.
Use tools like a goals-to-decisions matrix to pinpoint key performance indicators (KPIs) and evaluate how planning decisions impact these goals across the organisation. Consider specific organisational requirements, such as union regulations, multilingual operations, or regional variations, and test potential solutions with “what if” scenarios.
3. Conduct a financial analysis
The next step is to assess the financial impact of each feature on your prioritised list by considering both direct and ripple effects across the business. Start by calculating the costs of current practices to establish a baseline for measuring post-implementation performance. Build your analysis from the ground up, focusing on immediate impacts and progressing to key investment metrics like ROI, IRR and NPV.
Many organisations fail to calculate this accurately, because they fail to account for many costs and benefits.
- Be sure to calculate the ROI yourself. Don’t rely on vendor estimates
- Consider each cost component over the entire life cycle of the SCP&O solution
- Consider all return horizons (short-term scheduling, mid-term capacity planning, or long-term strategic planning) where savings and benefits will occur
- Be aware of interactions, especially savings in one area that may increase costs in another
- Look for ERP-related savings. Functions that may require time and effort to implement in a manufacturing ERP software solution can easily be added to an SCP&O solution
Be thorough, accounting for interactions, lifecycle costs, and ERP-related savings. While quantifying benefits is crucial, also consider subjective advantages like improved planning capabilities. Avoid relying solely on vendor estimates, and assess how well a solution meets 100 percent of your requirements – shortfalls in key features can significantly impact value.
4. Research available vendors
Evaluate suppliers’ industry expertise, innovation track record, and customer success stories. Opt for providers which demonstrate a deep understanding of supply chain challenges and solutions.
Some of the high-level questions you should ask yourself at this point include:
Adrian Wood, Director of Strategic Business & Development and Offer Marketing Director, DELMIA
- Do we want a partner with a specialisation in SCP&O, or is there value in selecting a vendor for whom SCP&O is one part of a broad set of capabilities?
- Do we want a point solution that can only solve one aspect of our planning challenge, or a platform that can solve many of our challenges seen today and unforeseen tomorrow?
5. Build a business case
If you’ve identified your unique needs and assessed vendors’ capabilities, this step should be straightforward. Prepare a presentation for the evaluation team to present to decision makers, justifying the planned investment. The business case should document your unique business goals, planning decisions, critical features from Step 2, the economic analysis from Step 3, and the viable vendors identified in Step 4. The goal is to secure approval from decision makers to move forward and lay the foundation for a detailed investment analysis with real pricing, costs, and forecasted benefits from supply chain planning and optimisation.
Leverage executive sponsors to guide the appropriate level of detail for the business case. Use anecdotes from “the shop floor” to highlight current inefficiencies, the value gap that puts you at a disadvantage, and how optimisation will address these challenges. Show how SCP&O will improve operations, support competitive advantages, and enable planners to deliver more value. Explain how forward-looking forecasting adds agility to keep your organisation ahead of competitors.
Include all implementation costs – licensing, equipment, training (initial and ongoing), and the indirect costs of organisational change – and show how these are factored into your ROI calculation. Decision makers will also expect an executive summary of the top vendor solutions being considered.
6. Assess vendors thoroughly
From your list of viable candidates, narrow it down to a manageable number for further consideration. This is when you inform them that you are starting the process to select and purchase an SCP&O solution. Prepare a document outlining your requirements and desired capabilities to share with the vendors identified in Step 4. This could be a simple list from Step 2, when critical features were identified, or a formal request for information (RFI) for potential suppliers. The document should clearly communicate the strategic objectives, scope of the SCP&O project, and your business goals.
Create a scorecard listing all requirements and capabilities, along with how well each vendor meets them. Include weighting for each factor (how important it is) and assign scores based on vendor responses. Add external information such as third-party reviews (e.g. Gartner, SSC), trusted referrals, and publicly available data. At this stage, request budgetary pricing based on your scope and requirements (but don’t exclude vendors based solely on pricing).
7. Evaluate solutions with demos
Invite the shortlisted vendors to participate in detailed requirements gathering, meetings led by their sales teams, and software demos. Create a standard presentation to share with all vendors on your shortlist. You can either hold a bidders’ meeting to present to all vendors at once, or invite each vendor separately. In either case, present your detailed requirements under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) so that vendors can prepare their proposals.
Expect vendors to follow their own sales processes, but maintain control over the evaluation process. Develop a demo evaluation script, similar to how you’d write RFP requirements, and prepare specific challenges.
Vendors should understand your testing agenda and evaluation criteria to prepare and demonstrate their features properly. During evaluations, explore unexpected issues or scenarios – they may reveal additional product value. Use these to assess vendor responsiveness, support and product flexibility. This is also an opportunity to gain insights into SCP&O best practices.
Your checklist should include specific functionality that is important for your unique needs. Some examples might include:
• Demand planning software
• Inventory planning
• Replenishment planning
• Sales and operations planning reports
• Capable-to-promise and available-to-promise
• Short-term production planning software
• Long-term manufacturing planning software
• Scenario planning
• Real-time adaptability
8. Examine implementation capabilities
Successful SCP&O implementations allow businesses to plan for profit, not just production. Unfortunately, many SCP&O implementations fail to meet expectations, due to unrealistic or flawed implementation plans. Research shows that 50 to 80 percent of software projects either fail or face challenges. Since SCP&O implementations impact almost every part of your organisation, a smooth process is crucial.
Ask vendors to demonstrate their expertise in project planning and execution. They should provide a documented implementation methodology for evaluation, including clear procedures, key activities, and deliverables. Look for a phased approach with steps such as:
1. Project initialisation
2. Analysis
3. Modelling
4. Iterative development
5. Implementation
6. Post-launch support
9. Make the final choice
After completing evaluations, you can fairly assess the value each vendor’s product brings to your organisation. Use your financial analysis, including short, mid, and long-term costs and benefits, to determine the total economic impact, considering both objective metrics like ROI and subjective factors like organisational improvements. This comprehensive approach ensures that you select the right vendor for your SCP&O investment, valuing it as a long-term asset, rather than just a cost.
10. Verify vendor credentials
After selecting your vendor, confirm their reliability before signing a contract. Request references from similar companies in your industry, review corporate financial information, and have your finance and legal teams conduct due diligence. Speak with references to understand their experience with the system, challenges faced, support quality, and why they chose the product.
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