Belmont, MA, February 1, 2018 – “Working on the Dark Side of the Moon” provides the first, ground-level look inside the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA) and a shadowy think tank affiliated with it. The book was launched originally last year and is now available to Smart Software customers. The author, known to many Smart Software customers as demand forecast expert and trainer is also a statistics professor who volunteered for a year-long sabbatical tour of duty in the NSA.  He ended up spending several years with the agency moving between business, academic, and the secret worlds. This book records his impressions of people and places never before described in such intimate detail.

A deeply personal account of the years spent within the most secretive organization in the world, Working on the Dark Side of the Moon explores the range of emotions an outsider experiences while crossing over to the “inside.” It also shows the positive side of an Agency whose secrecy hides dedicated men and women devoted to protecting the country while honoring the Constitution. 

Willemain writes, “The very secrecy that enables NSA to be effective also cripples its ability to explain its positive contributions. Into this void are projected grossly distorted views of what NSA does and what NSA
people are like. This book puts a human face on the people who work in this secret world: their character, motivations, frustrations, sense of humor. Readers can develop a more balanced and nuanced view of NSA and its people.”

About the Author
Dr. Thomas Reed Willemain served as an Expert Statistical Consultant to the National Security Agency (NSA) at Ft. Meade, MD and as a member of the Adjunct Research Staff at an affiliated think-tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses Center for Computing Sciences (IDA/CCS). He is Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, having previously held faculty positions at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also co-founder and Senior Vice President/Research at Smart Software, Inc. He is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, the Military Operations Research Society, the American Statistical Association, and several other professional organizations. Willemain received the BSE degree (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Princeton University and the MS and PhD degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His other books include: Statistical Methods for Planners, Emergency Medical Systems Analysis (with R. C. Larson), and 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics in statistics, operations research, health care and other topics. For more information, email: TomW@SmartCorp.com or visit TomWillemain.com.

For more information please email tomw@smartcor.com or visit www.tom.willemain.com 

For more information, please contact Smart Software, Inc., Four Hill Road, Belmont, MA 02478.
Phone: 1-800-SMART-99 (800-762-7899); FAX: 1-617-489-2748

For Immediate Release

Collaboration Leverages Cloud Analytics and Inventory Modeling to Improve the Bottom Line

Belmont, Massachusetts. December 18, 2017 – Smart Software, a global provider of next generation 100% web-based demand planning, forecasting and inventory optimization solutions, announces today their enhanced partnership with Epicor Software Corporation.  This collaboration for the first time brings the cloud-based Smart IP&O (Inventory Planning and Optimization) into the latest version of the Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. By seamlessly integrating strategic planning with operational execution, business users can continuously predict, respond and plan more effectively in today’s uncertain business environment.

Scott Hays, Senior Vice President, Product Marketing, Epicor says “Smart Software helps Epicor ERP customers by delivering insightful business analytics for inventory modeling and forecasting that drive ordering and replenishment in our latest version of Epicor ERP. Having too much or not enough inventory are both costly problems. With the addition of Smart IP&O, senior executives gain the means to shape inventory strategy to align with the business objectives, while empowering their planning teams.”

The joint offering makes all transactional data in Epicor ERP, such as shipments, sales orders, receipts, inventory on hand, and more, available in Smart IP&O’s data model. Smart IP&O brings this data to life leveraging field-proven analytics. This enables executives and their planning team to identify operational inefficiencies, accurately forecast demand, and model the financial and customer impact of current and proposed inventory policies.

Greg Hartunian, CEO of Smart Software stated “Businesses that leverage cloud analytics are able to better understand their operations, lower costs, improve customer service, and outperform the competition. We look forward to working closely with Epicor to help our joint customers achieve these key benefits.”

Find out more about how Smart Software can help your company in this APICS article “Automated Statistical Analysis Drives Inventory Management”

About Smart Software: Since its founding in 1981, Smart Software has been a leading global provider of demand planning, forecasting, and inventory optimization solutions.  We help our customers utilize their corporate data including sales history, demand signals, supplier transactions, and more to better forecast sales, optimize inventory stocking requirements, and identify opportunities to improve operational efficiency.  Today hundreds of leading organizations around the globe including FedEx, The Home Depot, Metro-North Railroad, Disneyland Resorts, and MARS, as well as many mid- and small market enterprises use our solutions to improve forecast accuracy and optimize inventory levels.

Epicor and Epicor ERP are trademarks or registered trademarks of Epicor Software Corporation, registered in the United States and other countries.

Melbourne, Australia, December 5, 2017 – SparePartsKnowHow.com and Smart Software announced a new content sharing alliance as part of Smart Software’s sponsorship of SparePartsKnowHow.com. The alliance brings together SparePartsKnowHow.com, the leading provider of spare parts related online training, and Smart Software, a global leader in demand planning and forecasting solutions.

This alliance will enable SparePartsKnowHow.com to expand its already extensive knowledge base to include more demand planning and forecasting content. In turn, Smart Software will make use of SparePartsKnowHow.com content to provide a greater breadth of know-how to its clients.

Referring to this alliance, Mr. Greg Hartunian, President & CEO of Smart Software said, ‘Phillip Slater is a global thought-leader in spare parts inventory management and has built SparePartsKnowHow.com into the leading online resource center for spare parts management practitioners. We are very excited to be associated with the site.’

‘In particular we were attracted by the global reach that the site provides and we want to be part of that reach into the future. Our mission is to provide analytical solutions that help our customers leverage their corporate data to plan for demand, optimize stock holding, and to generate significant economic return. By joining in this alliance, we expect to gain even further exposure to the global community of spare parts management professionals. In turn, this means that more companies will be able to achieve their spare parts management goals.’

Phillip Slater, Founder of SparePartsKnowHow.com said, ‘Our vision is to become the central hub for anyone involved in spare parts management, anywhere in the world.  In addition to our own online resource center and training, with this alliance, our clients and subscribers will be introduced to additional content and a service provider that they can trust.’

Mr. Slater added, ‘We have been very selective in forming alliances and one of the attractions of Smart Software is that they have a clear understanding of one of the main problems with spare parts management: forecasting of parts that exhibit intermittent demand. Their APICS award-winning method for intermittent demand forecasting is a clear differentiator of Smart Software’s expertise and makes them a welcome addition to SparePartsKnowHow.com.’

‘I suggest that anyone interested in understanding Smart Software’s approach register for their upcoming webinar.’

For more information please visit SmartCorp.com and SparePartsKnowHow.com.

About Smart Software Inc.

Since its founding in 1981, Smart Software has been a leading provider of demand planning, forecasting, and inventory optimization solutions.  Smart Software helps customers utilize their corporate data including sales history, demand signals, supplier transactions, and more to better forecast sales, optimize inventory stocking requirements, and identify opportunities to improve operational efficiency.  Today hundreds of leading organizations around the globe including FedEx, The Home Depot, Metro-North Railroad, Disneyland Resorts, and MARS, as well as many mid- and small market enterprises use Smart Software solutions to improve forecast accuracy and optimize inventory levels.

About SparePartsKnowHow.com

SparePartsKnowHow.com was launched in 2011 to provide online training specifically for spare parts inventory management. That is what makes this service unique. The site content has been developed in response to specific ‘real world’ spare parts management issues, rather than based on generic theory. The videos and training modules are developed from programs that have helped companies achieve some astonishing inventory optimization results – including inventory optimization exceeding 50%. The website is designed to give members the online training and support needed to become high achievers in spare parts inventory management.

Contact Information:

Phillip Slater
Founder, SparePartsKnowHow.com
+61 3 9331 3181
pslater@InitiateAction.com

SmartForecasts is a registered trademark of Smart Software, Inc.  All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

For more information, please contact Smart Software, Inc., Four Hill Road, Belmont, MA 02478.
Phone: 1-800-SMART-99 (800-762-7899); FAX: 1-617-489-2748

Introduction

Metro-North Railroad (MNR) is part of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, and services commuters and other travelers in the New York metropolitan area. It’s the second largest commuter railroad in the U.S. serving 300,000 passengers each weekday, while operating 1,266 engines and rail cars over 775 miles of track.

The Material Management division is charged with stocking spare parts inventory. It maintains 37,500 parts valued at $107 million. More than 80% of its inventory has extremely volatile and hard-to-forecast intermittent demand.

Challenge: Safety Stock for Long-Lived Assets

MNR’s prime objective is to move people in a timely manner. For service outages, it must have the right items in stock to fix the problem.

Service level is MNR’s most important key performance indicator. At the beginning, it found itself with too much expensive inventory sitting idle and an unacceptably low 95.8% service level.

To remedy this situation, Material Management needed to be able to analyze all of MNR’s inventory, including items with intermittent demand, and then optimize them while simultaneously increasing service levels. MNR did not have appropriate planning tools to do the job.

MNR also faced several other challenges: ridership was increasing, and the agency was expanding its fleets, retiring old trains, and introducing new ones. With a five-year planning horizon, MNR needed to maintain adequate safety stock for an asset service life of 20 years or more, and replacement lead times, for some parts, of more than a year.

Solution: SmartForecasts

After a thorough evaluation process, MNR selected Smart Software’s SmartForecasts^®. Smart’s solution uses patented bootstrapping technology that accurately forecasts intermittent demand. It also provides inventory managers with accurate estimates of the optimal inventory and safety stock required to meet future orders and achieve desired service levels.

MNR realized a payback after only 9 months. SmartForecasts was used to identify overstocked items, many of which had pending orders. By putting holds on some orders, and canceling others, MNR realized immediate improvements in cash flows. Management was also able to identify items at risk of stocking out and re-deployed resources that buoyed immediate service level improvements.

Results:Accurate Intermittent Demand Forecasts

MNR’s multi-year project continues to provide improving results. Recently, some of the company’s notable successes and approaches for utilizing SmartForecasts, were cited in Material Management’s yearly report to its Board of Directors on previous year operations:

• Parts Inventory to support its equipment has declined 8% from $128 million.

• In the second year, following a continuing trend, customer service levels reached a record high 98.7%. This was accomplished with a new fleet growth of over 2%

• SmartForecasts was instrumental in reducing inventory growth for new equipment from a projected 10% to only 6%.

• MNR uses SmartForecasts to identify multi-year service part needs for long-term contracts. By contracting with suppliers on a multi-year agreements, administrative lead times were greatly reduced. This enabled further reductions in stock without compromising service.

• Smart Forecast was critical in the formulation of a stock reduction plan for MNR’s retiring fleet, and helped identify inventory retirement reserves, enabling MNR to maximize disposal benefits and warehouse bin space reclamation.

• MNR identified $1.6 million in inactive inventory for final disposal, and provided availability of excess parts to Long Island Railroad, thus potentially minimizing additional MTA inventory investments.

According to Rich Price, Chief Material Officer at MNR, “SmartForecasts does the job. It’s the only solution out there I’m aware of that has really licked the intermittent demand modeling challenge. It gives us accurate information and more importantly at the lowest dollar. That’s the bottom line we’re really interested in. Without SmartForecasts, I think we would have seen a continued growth in our inventory and not necessarily gotten any greater benefit for service.”

Vicor Corporation, a publicly traded, $200 million company with headquarters in Andover, Massachusetts, is a build-to-order manufacturer of power conversion products for the electronics OEM market. Vicor produces 30,000 product items grouped into fifteen product families. The items are made from 10-15,000 components. As a build-to-order manufacturer, Vicor does both assembly and fabrication. It also tries to run a lean operation, keeping a very low backlog of finished good items and only ordering component parts on an as-needed basis. This strategy tends to lower inventory costs but also heightens the company’s risk of stocking out of key items.

The Challenge

While a few hundred of Vicor’s products are sold on a regular basis, some are ordered as little as every two years-a factor that makes demand forecasting and inventory planning more difficult. Yet Vicor’s business success depends critically on having the right component in stock when it’s needed to make a product item. So, having an accurate forecasting process in place is a major contributor to the company’s smooth operations.

As CIO of Vicor Corporation, Doug Richardson was charged with helping the company achieve two strategic objectives: improve on-time delivery of the company’s products and reduce inventory levels.

The Solution

Starting in 1999, Richardson led a team that replaced Vicor’s old manufacturing systems and a homegrown forecasting system with the PeopleSoft ERP system and SmartForecasts Enterprise. In May 2002, Vicor completed a tight integration of SmartForecasts with PeopleSoft’s Production Planning module, and by July 2002, the company started seeing positive results. Mark Vernaglia, senior operations planner at Vicor, makes the point that the ability to interactively adjust the statistical forecast results and understand seasonality were two big selling points in SmartForecasts’ favor.

Vicor has a two-phase demand forecasting process that combines both sales force and statistical forecasting techniques. In the first phase, the sales force obtains judgmental predictions directly from Vicor’s largest customers regarding their demand for each of the company’s product items. These customers account for about 40 to 50 percent of Vicor’s shipment volume. In the second phase, the shipment history for these customers is excluded, and SmartForecasts’ Automatic Forecasting capabilities are used to forecast statistically the product demand expected from all of the other customers. By summing these two sets of results, Vicor generates the total production forecast for each product item.

Because Vicor needs to assign future revenue goals for its product families as part of its sales and operations planning (S&OP), the company also makes use of SmartForecasts’ top-down modeling capabilities. It uses SmartForecasts to impose the build plan for each family and to intelligently distribute that goal among the items in the family.

The Results

In less than a year following integration with the PeopleSoft system, SmartForecasts uncovered a critical upward trend in Vicor’s business. “At first we thought something was wrong,” stated Richardson. So Vicor did the forecast again with more demand history as input. Sure enough, SmartForecasts had spotted a trend that began in late 2001.

“The SmartForecasts results provided evidence that the post-9/11 business downturn had hit bottom,” Richardson continued. “If SmartForecasts hadn’t uncovered the upward trend, we wouldn’t have had enough inventory on hand to meet demand.”

The system has continued to deliver substantial results that put the company well on the road to achieving its strategic objectives. According to Richardson, on-time delivery performance (customer service level) has increased by 10 percentage points and, at the same time, inventories are down by 20 percent. The improvements are the results of hard work by a team focused on improving order fulfillment, a key element of which is the company’s ability to better forecast inventory needs and understand demand patterns with SmartForecasts Enterprise.

The forecasting process has been greatly enhanced since the integration of SmartForecasts Enterprise with Vicor’s PeopleSoft system. Before the implementation, Vicor only forecasted about twenty percent of its products, in part because the old homegrown forecasting system was cumbersome to use and didn’t have the necessary horsepower or data capacity. Because of the speed of SmartForecasts and its ease of use, the company can now forecast more than eighty percent of its items. The ability to forecast more products has been a big factor in reducing Vicor’s inventory requirements and improving service levels.

Mark Vernaglia feels very comfortable using SmartForecasts and claims that he was able to be proficient with little training. “We’re getting great results,” stated Vernaglia, “and I haven’t even started taxing the software’s capabilities.”

The results have made Vernaglia more confident in his job. “With SmartForecasts we’ve been able to be much more aggressive with our inventory planning,” he continued. “You’ve got to have confidence in your forecast, and we now have the confidence to stock certain component parts that we didn’t have before.”

In the future, Vernaglia plans to expand the forecasting process to the component level and to start using SmartForecasts’ patented intermittent demand forecasting capabilities. He’s confident that these unique capabilities will help Vicor improve its ability to set stocking levels appropriately for slow-moving items.

Vicor looks forward to continuing improvements. “I’m willing to bet that our numbers will continue to go in opposite directions-inventory down and service levels up,” wagered Vernaglia. These are the kinds of changes that continue to help Vicor’s management achieve its strategic goals.