Cliff Holste, Materials Handling Editor

The News: RedPrairie, one of the world's largest suppliers of supply chain software applications, announced at its annual User Conference today that is had acquired SmartTurn, a provider of on-demand WMS solutions for smaller sites and inventory storage locations.

	SCDigest Says:
	Smart Turn was launched several years ago and targeted not only smaller warehouses but actually almost any remote location where inventory is held - and often not well controlled. What Do You Say? Click Here to Send Us Your Comments

Why it Matters: The move signals the increasing market pressure for supply chain software vendors to make their solutions available in On-Demand or Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery mode. The acquisition by the much larger RedPrairie may accelerate the adoption of inventory control by large enterprises to small nodes in their supply chains.

The Story: No sooner did we release our Supply Chain Digest Letter on On-Demand Supply Chain Software than RedPrairie announced it has acquired Smart Turn, an On-Demand WMS provider.

Smart Turn was launched several years ago and targeted not only smaller warehouses but actually almost any remote location where inventory is held - and often not well controlled. Think about areas such as stock rooms at a large hotel chain, MRO materials in small production facilities temporary storage locatios, and many other examples. SmartTurn had its roots in Navis, a provider of Yard Management Systems, starting as a division of Navis in 2004. When Navis was later sold to Zebra Technologies, it allowed CEO Jim Burleigh and others to focus on the WMS solution.

According to RedPrairie CEO Mike Mayoras, Burleigh will stay on and run RedPrairie's new On-Demand business unit. He said that with RedPrairie traditionally focusing on the middle and upper ends of the market, the acquisition brings needed expertise into the company as to how to reach the smaller end segment - a market that could be based on the size of the company, but could also mean a large company that happens to have many small inventory storage locations or distribution points for which a traditional WMS would be too expensive and cumbersome to deploy and manage.

In a presentation at the RedPrairie conference, Burleigh made a point that shows how different and disruptive the On-Demand movement might come to be. While software pricing for larger, traditional systems is often mysterious and hard for users to really understand until contract time, the SmartTurn system has very straightforward and transparent pricing - $1200.00 per inventory location per month, likely subject to some discounting for a company with a large number of sites.

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