SUPPLY CHAIN VISIBILITY MARKET WILL QUADRUPLE BY 2006

SUPPLY CHAIN VISIBILITY MARKET WILL QUADRUPLE BY 2006    The market for supply chain visibility technology will quadruple from $125 million last year to more than $515 million in 2005, according to ARC Advisory Group, a consulting firm based in Massachusetts.
   ARC said the Supply Chain Process Management market includes order and shipment tracking tools that provide alerts, alert resolution logic and extended supply chain visibility of inventory.
   Young and immature, the SCPM market looks like the Supply Chain Planning market did in the early 1990s, ARC said. The SCPM market, now dominated by the likes of i2 Technologies and Manugistics, averaged 40 percent average annual growth for the first six or seven years of its existence. ARC expects similar growth in SCPM, forecasting 33 percent average annual growth over the next five years.
   Many companies now claim to offer total supply chain visibility, but few, if any, have actually been able to manage all of the data necessary from all of the parties active in any given international supply chain.