Ilog takes advanced planning and scheduling to a new lower price level

Its Optimisation Decision Management System (ODMS) is the industry’s first system offering the best of both worlds – custom applications that are lower cost and supportable irrespective of the complexity, planning/scheduling horizons, industry and core ERP system. “Custom application have always offered benefits over packaged systems, but they’ve been very difficult and expensive to implement, and they didn’t get the benefits of pre-packaged best practices and processes,” says Greger Ottosson, product manager ODMS. “Now we’re changing the dynamics – pre-packing ‘what ifs’, scenario analysis and so on so that users don’t have to build all the screens from scratch, and reduce maintenance costs, but enabling complete customisation.” How? ODMS is based on an extension of Ilog’s existing model development software tool with what’s termed a ‘decision maker’ suite acting as the GUI (graphical user interface) to the rest of the system. “From a mathematical model, it generates the model to run in ODMS with KPIs, goals and so on automatically, so it’s much quicker and easier to develop, prototype and then support,” says Ottosson. The firm denies that the new system is essentially Ilog’s latest way of differentiating itself from the increasingly able big ticket ERP vendors, most of which have introduced optimisers and systems. Says Ottosson: “We don’t see that. We see and increased need, with more customers opening up to APS and optimisation and seeing the limits of existing packaged applications. They want more at a reasonable price and that’s what we’re offering them.” Ilog says it’s working with two customers using the system now, one of those being in manufacturing. Pricing for a custom solution is between $250,000 and $500,000, roughly half of which is services, depending on complexity, numbers of custom screens and so on.