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IBM Sterling vs AIMMS

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Our analysts compared IBM Sterling vs AIMMS based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Supply Chain Management Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Overview Pricing Benefits & Features User Ratings Analyst Summary Screenshots
IBM Sterling Software Tool
AIMMS Software Tool
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Product Basics

IBM Sterling is an open, integrated platform that leverages advanced technologies like AI and blockchain to connect with the supplier ecosystem. It provides real-time insights, end-to-end visibility and recommended measures to transform interruptions into customer engagement, profit and growth opportunities.

It offers support for supplier, inventory and order management. Users can build smarter business networks using business process improvement, supply chain visibility, supplier collaboration, manufacturing solutions, order fulfillment and retail solutions. It also supports B2B collaboration to fulfill ongoing business demands, minimize complexity and reduce costs.
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AIMMS is a software platform provider that lets users improve operations, strategy and planning or transform the entire supply chain. It democratizes the use of prescriptive analytics to help organizations with their decision-making processes.

It is designed for global and regional businesses, academic organizations and government agencies. It enables organizations to solve complex problems and uncover new opportunities through modeling, optimization and data visualization capabilities.
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Product Insights

  • Evolve Business Processes: Maintain business continuity, reduce operational silos, respond to market disruptions and mitigate risks with intelligent workflows. Improve interactions between people, data and processes through its experts and reduce inventory costs with process improvements. 
  • Improve Visibility: Supply chain stakeholders can access data related to inventory, order processes, delivery and potential disruptions. Improves customer service, assists with regulatory directives and mitigates interruptions affecting supplier inventory levels and product delivery with advanced insights. 
  • Supplier Collaboration: Streamline collaboration to drive efficiencies, increase supplier satisfaction, resolve disruptions for procure-to-pay transactions and order-to-cash with supplier collaboration solutions and global business networks. Quickly respond to supplier issues with embedded AI capabilities like cycle time prediction, anomaly detection and next-best-action recommendations. 
  • Deliver Customer Promises: Track orders from inception to delivery, manage data and processes and gain visibility into all orders throughout channels. Offers various solutions that include order management, order fulfillment, inventory management and digital store operations. 
  • Enhance Manufacturing Management: Innovate supply chain management by transforming outdated processes, uncovering hidden insights and delivering superior customer experience with automation, IoT, AI and blockchain. It helps avoid disruptions, improve visibility, respond quickly and streamline planning and optimization. 
  • Retail Technology Services: Evolve the shopping experience with advanced retail solutions for fulfilling digital demands. Revitalize customer engagement by delivering omnichannel marketing messages and offers tailored to the customer base. Minimize disruptions to the supply chain through various retail technology solutions. 
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  • Pricing Optimization: It gives visibility into forecast demand and lets users develop promotional and pricing strategies through pricing modeling. Price models can help calculate demand variation at various price levels, assess inventory levels and costs, support development and design of products, optimize promotion activities and analyze the impact on market share. 
  • Strategic Sourcing: AIMMS provides procurement professionals with desired decision support, which helps them access saving opportunities and extract more value from them. It can carry out a successful and agile sourcing process through a collaboration of suppliers, business experts and professional buyers. 
  • Workforce Scheduling: It optimizes work schedules that let organizations achieve high customer and employee satisfaction rates. It can be used to reduce scheduling time and effort, calculate optimal capacity required and deliver immediate value. Decision support is also provided to re-optimize and allocate the right resources per shift to the demand. 
  • Manage Energy Systems: AIMMS can improve balance supply and demand by managing constantly evolving and complex energy systems. Energy companies can build custom and deployable technologies through solver selection and multi-dimensional functionalities. It can suggest better dispatch instructions through an effective and quick analysis of network conditions. 
  • Project Portfolio Optimization: Companies can improve decision making for large scale investments through project portfolio optimization. It provides a systematic way of defending and analyzing project selection and capital budgeting decisions, increasing transparency. It can improve capital efficiency and overall ROI. 
  • Optimize Production Planning: It provides planners with multi-dimensional data modeling tools that can efficiently produce scheduling solutions. Production schedule optimization can save planners’ time and create efficient production plans. 
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  • Business Network: Offers cloud-based and security-rich connectivity with suppliers, partners and customers. Ensure timely order deliveries with real-time intelligence and recommendations through AI capabilities. Provides multi-party visibility of digital events throughout the supply chain via blockchain, empowering transparency and trust. 
  • Food Trust: Connects participants through an immutable, permissioned and shared record of processing details, food provenance, transaction data and more through its collaborative network. Trace the location and status of food products, including essential details like multi-ingredient and farm-store view. 
  • Visibility Insights: Optimize performance by correlating data from disparate and siloed systems, creating digital playbooks and capturing organizational knowledge. Accelerate time to value, get intelligent insights, manage inventory and mitigate disruptions to meet demand through the inventory control tower. Supply chain intelligence services help boost data integration by developing purpose-built control towers using a control tower solution blueprint. 
  • TradeLens Platform: Gain access to a supply chain and logistics network with over half of the global container shipping volume data coverage through an interconnected supply chain partners system. Every shipment party can access their information and all transactions’ audit trails using its permission matrix. Offers services and apps developed by TradeLens and third parties to accelerate innovation and value creation. 
  • Trust Your Supplier: Identify, onboard and manage qualified suppliers through a blockchain-based solution. It helps expedite supplier onboarding, lower procurement operating costs, reduce compliance risk, speed new supplier assessments, access verified data and streamline insight sharing. 
  • Business Transaction Intelligence: Provides insights into B2B transaction lifecycles. Offers multi-part shared transaction visibility and empowers users with real-time visibility and self-service. Prevents potential risks by giving discrepancy alerts on B2B transaction anomalies. 
  • Transaction Manager: Automates manual B2B transactions and helps save money and time by cutting costs, reducing errors and elevating user satisfaction with customers, non-EDI suppliers and other trading partners. Gain unified visibility throughout supply chain partner transactions and onboard non-technical trading partners. 
  • Document Conversion Services: Converts manual transactions and non-structured documents like email, pdf and fax into EDI or other structured formats. Provides various features, including advanced OCR to read images, customized exception handling, multiple language support and ICR technology to recognize handwriting. 
  • Order Management: Ensures omnichannel order fulfillment by combining inventory and delivery visibility, multichannel order aggregation and service availability in a single platform. It helps customize monitoring and alerts, take immediate actions on capacity, deliver order promises with intelligent fulfillment and use reverse logistics to track inventory. 
  • Fulfillment Optimizer with Watson: Enhance existing order management systems and minimize cost-to-serve with cognitive analytics engine. Retailers can utilize store capacity, balance protecting margins and meet delivery expectations, increasing profits. 
  • Inventory Visibility: Explore product highlights and find use-case specific solutions. Users can personalize dashboards, balance inventory across channels, track inventory velocity, enable drop shipping, leverage autoscaling, get real-time views with the Cassandra database, Akamai gateways and more. 
  • Store Engagement: Gain inventory, customer and order data view through an intuitive user-interface, accessible from mobile devices and sales counters. Provides cross-sell and up-sell recommendations, enables flexible fulfillment options, helps standardize processes for task and inventory management and manages returns throughout channels using purpose-built tools. 
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  • Supply Chain Network Design: AIMMS helps users meet their strategic needs through an intuitive supply chain network design application. Network design navigator can unite modeling capability with breakthrough usability that provides support in every step. Users can easily evaluate scenarios, conduct center of gravity analysis, calculate cost curves, make contingency plans and more. 
  • Sales and Operations Planning: It offers a fast and easy to configure sales and operations planning application, S&OP navigator. S&OP navigator provides good connectivity and optimization capabilities. It helps users compare multiple scenarios, align capacity and supply planning, calculate EBITDA impact, monitor forecast impacts and integrate with ERP systems. 
  • Data Configuration: AIMMS supports an integrated cloud database that can manage complexity and help users share data across various functional areas in AIMMS SC navigator applications. It can save time and let users focus on the insights from data. 
  • Demand Forecasting: It provides a user-friendly demand forecasting navigator that cleanses data and helps users concentrate on important outliers and trends. It uses machine learning algorithms to fine-tune forecasts regularly. Users can automate labor-intensive work, define a multi-tier forecasting and easily identify trends and adjust for seasonality. 
  • Lifecycle Navigator: It can provide visibility into the performance of products through a lifecycle navigator. Supply chain professionals can optimize sales and operations planning, inventory and production decisions to increase revenue and margins through prescriptive analytics. It can analyze product growth and declining trends with their impact on inventory, costs and revenue. 
  • Integrated Business Planning: Users can drive alignment and collaboration throughout the business with integrated business planning. It can manage product introductions, form various demand scenarios, evaluate supply scenarios, determine vulnerabilities and opportunities, reconcile back to business plans and financial metrics. 
  • SC Navigator Platform: AIMMS offers a secure platform that provides users with accessible, intuitive and connected next-gen applications, including network design, inventory management and S&OP. It can deliver flexibility, transparency of custom apps and speed of packaged software paired with advanced analytics. 
  • Prescriptive Analytics Platform: It delivers solutions that can boost business performance through mathematical optimization and modeling. Its drag-and-drop functionality and visual options can speed up model creation. Users can quickly develop solutions using proprietary language, along with built-in diagnostic tools and IDE. It offers a development tool, AIMMS Developer that can quickly build custom applications and a deployment tool, AIMMS PRO that can instantly provide solutions to end users. 
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Product Ranking

#19

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Supply Chain Management Software

#157

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Supply Chain Management Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 47 reviews
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84%
of users recommend this product

IBM Sterling has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 47 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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4.1 (38)
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5.0 (1)
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4.6 (5)
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4.5 (2)
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4.0 (1)
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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Integration: It supports integration with multiple external systems, as noted by 88% of reviewers who mention integration.
Customization: It offers highly customizable tools and features, as observed by 50% of the users who refer to reports.
Ease of Use: It offers a flexible platform that is easy to use, manage and modify, as noted by all the reviewers specifying ease of use.
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Fast Application Development: AIMMS enables users to quickly prototype and build optimization applications, even without coding experience, making it efficient for businesses to create tailored solutions.
Improved Decision-Making: AIMMS provides tools like scenario simulation and "what-if" analysis, allowing businesses to evaluate different possibilities and make informed decisions regarding their supply chain.
Enhanced Collaboration: The platform fosters collaboration by providing a centralized hub for data and insights, enabling teams across different departments to align on supply chain strategies.
Strong Community Support: AIMMS offers a dedicated community platform with resources like case studies, webinars, and user forums, providing businesses with ample support and guidance for implementation and problem-solving.
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Learning Curve: It is complicated to understand and involves a steep learning curve, as stated by 57% of the users who report learning curve.
Interface: Over 50% of reviewers that mentioned the interface stated that the interface is not user-friendly and intuitive.
Resource-Intensive: It consumes a large amount of system resources, as observed by all reviewers referring to system resource utilization.
Implementation: Around 67% of the users who specified implementation report that the deployment and implementation process is cumbersome.
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Potential Resistance to Change: Some team members might be resistant to adopting new software, especially if they are accustomed to their existing workflows and processes.
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IBM Sterling is a flexible and easy-to-use supply chain suite that helps its customers build dynamic and smarter business networks. It has a highly customizable platform and supports comprehensive integration capabilities with various external systems. Many reviewers have noted that it does not have an intuitive user interface, and the implementation process can be cumbersome. It involves a steep learning curve, and users find it complicated to understand. It also consumes a large amount of system resources, making it slow sometimes.

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Is AIMMS really aiming for the stars when it comes to user satisfaction in the world of supply chain optimization? User reviews from the past year suggest that AIMMS hits the mark in several key areas. Users consistently praise AIMMS for its user-friendliness and flexibility, allowing both seasoned data scientists and business users to build and deploy sophisticated optimization models with relative ease. This stands in stark contrast to some competitors known for their steep learning curves and reliance on IT departments. For instance, one user highlighted how AIMMS enabled their team to quickly develop a brewery capacity model, a testament to its intuitive interface and powerful modeling capabilities. This ease of use translates into faster deployment times and quicker ROI, a crucial factor in today's fast-paced business environment. Furthermore, AIMMS shines in its ability to handle complex scenarios and provide prescriptive analytics. Users appreciate the software's capacity to tackle intricate supply chain problems, such as network design and demand forecasting, with accuracy and speed. This empowers businesses to move beyond simple descriptive analytics and make data-driven decisions that optimize their supply chain operations, leading to tangible cost savings and improved efficiency. AIMMS is best suited for businesses of all sizes looking for a robust, user-friendly, and scalable supply chain optimization solution. Its combination of powerful modeling capabilities, intuitive interface, and comprehensive support resources makes it a compelling choice for organizations seeking to enhance their supply chain visibility, agility, and profitability.

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