Harvinder Sembhi will talk about how his company is leveraging supplier e-collaboration tools to provide benefits for Celestica and its customers. Celestica is implementing an application from e2Open. Mr. Sembhi will give an overview of Celestica’s SCM strategy and discuss in further detail about supplier e-collaboration business drivers, selection and implementation approach and current status of the deployment.

Tim S. McLaren, Ryerson University, tmclaren@ryerson.ca

Priscilla R. Manatsa, Ryerson University

Distinguishing among large supply chain management software packages is difficult due to the complexity and breadth of the software. In this paper, we use text mining tools to perform a comparative analysis of documentation covering the seven most popular supply chain software packages (from SAP, i2, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Manhattan Associates, IBS, and Manugistics). Concept maps created for each of the packages indicate a high degree of similarity among the 20 most influential concepts, yet significant differences beyond the top 20 concepts. This suggests any distinguishing features are deeply buried in the documentation, while at a surface level all seven vendors address the same concepts. The resultant concept maps extend and refine earlier studies of the functionality and classification of supply chain software. Guidelines for using this knowledge to make more rational and informed software selection decisions are discussed.