Dev diary 1: Why are we doing this?

The last few days have been quite productive. We have been able to overhaul the demand forecasting functionality to use an automatic model selection which is quite cool, if I say so myself. I will have to write a functionality spotlight at some point on that.

We have been hard at work refining the usability and especially the demo side of things. We are still scoping out a proper "Day-in-the-life" workflow in the system, and working on demo data alone has of course the risk of missing some bad holes in our usability. Looking forward to working with a first real customer, but Merkurius is definitely at the moment in "early Access".

We want to be honest in our development path, since bragging about customers we don't have would be leading interested parties on to a wrong path.

I want to take this opportunity to also open up a bit on why we are Building Merkurius in the first Place.

We have been working with commercial S&OP and IBP tools for nearly a decade and the same issue repeats: A prospect would be interested to get rid of spreadsheet planning, they lack transparency and manual planning causes extra work and is error prone. Tools like SAP IBP, Kinaxis, Quintiq, OMP, Logility all have one thing in common: they mostly care about Enterprise customers with revenues at least 150M€, usually closer to 1B€. Forecasting, inventory planning and supply capacity planning however, are things that any manufacturing or hybrid make-and-buy Company would need to do. Who services them? S&OP is not something Limited to large enterprises, the same ideas scale down to a team of one supply chain Planner that might already be wearing multiple hats.

We are Building Merkurius to support those companies that are looking to relieve their spreadsheet coverage, to work on a cloud native solution you can Access on your phone. You can model your entire supply chain, albeit we are relying on excel imports at the moment, but everyone is working with Excel anyway. Even now, you could make an End-to-End monthly plan on Merkurius, you can even build it from scratch! It's free for now, have a go at it!

Cheers,
Merkurius Team