The Australian sector context for Tridant's expanding supply chain practice. Vendor landscape, demand drivers, and where the centre of gravity is shifting in 2026.
For most of the last decade, Australian and APAC supply chain planning sat in a hybrid state: enterprise ERPs at the source, vendor planning tools partially deployed, and the actual planning work still living in Excel models maintained by individual planners. The COVID demand shocks, the 2022–2023 input-cost crises, and the 2025 tariff regime each exposed the same weakness — when conditions move quickly, spreadsheet-anchored planning cannot move with them.
2026 is the year that gap is being closed by procurement budget rather than goodwill. Enterprise customers across mining, FMCG, manufacturing, retail and aftermarket services are moving onto purpose-built planning platforms — Anaplan for connected planning, Kinaxis for concurrent supply chain orchestration, Syncron for aftermarket service-parts planning, SAP IBP for SAP-anchored shops, and o9 / Blue Yonder for the larger global enterprises.
The Australian consulting market that delivers these implementations is concentrated. Tridant, KPMG, Deloitte, Accenture, Bourne, and a small number of vendor-specific specialists make up most of the senior-practitioner capacity in country. Demand for hands-on consultants who can both gather business requirements and configure the platform exceeds supply.
| Vendor | Strength | Tridant Partnership |
|---|---|---|
| Anaplan | Connected planning across finance, supply, workforce, sales — single hyperblock engine | ANZ Implementation Partner |
| Kinaxis | Concurrent planning, control tower, supply chain orchestration — fastest in-production go-live in the Gartner MQ | AU Implementation Partner |
| Syncron | Aftermarket inventory and pricing for OEMs, distributors, importers — Service Lifecycle Management focus | ANZ VAR partner (Dec 2025) |
| SAP IBP | Native IBP for SAP ECC / S/4HANA estates — strongest where SAP is already source-of-truth | Delivered as part of mixed engagements |
| o9 Solutions | AI-native enterprise IBP, knowledge graph-driven — Gartner MQ Leader, large global enterprises | Competitive in flagship deals |
| Blue Yonder | Retail and CPG planning, fulfilment, workforce — deepest retail benchmark library | Competitive in retail / CPG |
| Workday Adaptive | FP&A planning, mid-market focus — Tridant's "Ignite" packaging for SME | ANZ Implementation Partner |
| IBM (TM1 / Cognos / Planning Analytics) | Long-tail enterprise CPM — established customers, migration pathway live | Long-standing partner |