According to Gartner there are  Five Stages of Maturity in Supply Chain Planning Technology.   Most companies are currently looking to get to what Gartner refers to Stage 3 of supply chain planning. That is having the capability of System of Records (SoR) for their planning environment.  SoR implies a unified system for planners which is mainly horizontal across the supply chain. Although Stage 3, or SoR, is very important but it lends itself to a lot of manual planning and intervention by the planners in addition to scenario and what-if analysis. This is not a very productive use of planners' time and skill set. Furthermore, given the exponentially large number of options and scenarios, it is almost impossible to have a dependable plan let alone an optimal plan. To help planners, SoR systems need to be fast to respond. However, most vendors oversimplify the model of the supply chain in order to get quick answers at the cost of inaccurate plans. The latter results in much manual intervention by the planners and even worse it is not a plan that can be executed. Hence, taking away productivity from the execution side of the business. This lack of smooth transition between planning and execution is typically because S&OP systems lack proper modeling to allow for execution, what is referred to as Sales and Operation Execution (S&OE) . The modeling of almost all S&OP systems is fundamentally the same as spreadsheet planning, i.e. fixed lead times, bucketed capacities and pre-defined bottleneck resources, all of which are false assumptions.

Although Stage 3 can be beneficial, but once it is implemented, the need for Stage 4 becomes even more desirable. It is imperative that systems that are deployed for S&OP are capable enough to take the supply chain to stages 4 (Systems of Differentiation) and 5 (Systems of Innovation); or else multiple systems will have to be deployed for S&OE capability. Stages 4 and 5 depict accurate analytics, no touch decisions and automation of planning process. This is what is known as Digitization of supply chain the basic components of which are model accuracy and configurability.

Digitization of supply chain is a lot more than just collaboration, scenario analysis and Visibility. Digitization brings together disruptive technologies such as machine learning, big data analysis, artificial intelligence (clever search algorithms) to generate plans that are accurate, reliable, automated and improve by usage-Hence intelligent systems. The digitized supply chain delivers accurate plans without much input from the users, reduces cost, minimizes potential risk to the supply chain, improves productivity (usage of resources at high level and execution level) as well as responds to unexpected events while executing the plan.