Supply Chain Industry Trends and Priorities for 2017 Revealed in ERP Survey

VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.), a leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software developer, recently released the results of its 2017 Customer Survey, which collected feedback from more than 100 IT professionals to gauge projected industry-wide priorities and expectations for the year.

Having just announced the release of S2K 6.0, the latest version of its flagship ERP enterprise suite, VAI is using the survey as an opportunity to gather and share end-user insight into the industry.

Some of the more compelling findings include:

• Only 2.9% of respondents are pessimistic about their company's 2017 business outlook.
• 91% of companies expect the same or higher amount of IT spend in 2017.
• Nearly 50% of companies expect that analytics and business operations will have the largest impacts on their company.
• Implementing new technology solutions was 40% more likely to be named the largest IT challenge for the year than the next leading factor.

Kevin Beasley, CIO at VAI told SCMR in an interview that he was surprised to find a very high concentration of responses from their wholesale distribution and retail industry customers, yet lower amongst our significantly larger manufacturer base.

“We also saw that close to 80% of our customers are highly / cautiously optimistic about business in the next 12 months, with approximately 16% remaining neutral and just about 3% pessimistic,” he said. “Furthermore, we were additionally pleased to learn that 80% or responses have some level of use and experience with the cloud.”

Beasley said that in the future, his company would be interested in sorting our data by geographical location, which may offer a different perception into technological needs by region.

“Additionally, we would ensure categorization of results based upon executive, operations, and IT departments to see views from different perspectives,” he said.

The full list of survey results is available on VAI’s website.

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