Smart Software announced today that its co-founder and Senior VP of Research, Dr. Thomas Willemain, has been selected to present at the prestigious Emerging Techniques Forum on December 7-9, 2021, and also at the 89th MORS Symposium on June 21 – 25, 2021. MORS is the Military Operations Research Society, funded by the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Office of the Secretary of the Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is to enhance the quality of analysis that informs national and homeland security decisions.

1) MORS Virtual Symposium provides the defense analytic community with extensive content on emerging analytics topics and techniques. The focus for 89th MORS Symposium will be “Analytics to Enhance Decision Making.”  Willemain will present four sessions this year:

High-Dimensional Data Reconnaissance using Snakes

The Snake is a new analysis tool that can detect the presence of clusters and estimate their number. Snakes provide a unique and readily interpreted visual depiction of the structure of high-dimensional data.

Coincidences: Signal or Noise?

We want to know whether the simultaneous occurrence of two events, i.e., a coincidence, is merely a chance event. If not, there may be some exploitable link between the events. We propose more comprehensive tests based on models of events that account for autocorrelation, trend, and seasonality. 

Generation of Visual Scenarios for Use in Operator Training

Operator training is enhanced by exposure to scenarios depicting real-world data streams. Properly tuned time series bootstraps can create univariate and multivariate scenarios that meet quantity, cost, fidelity, and variety standards. 

Testing for Equality of Several Distributions in High Dimensions

A fundamental Testing and Evaluation analysis task is looking for differences among alternative systems or processes.  Several new tree-based statistics work well for effects that have multiple impacts in both MVN and non-MVN data.

2) The Emerging Techniques Forum provides the defense analytic community with extensive content on emerging analytic topics and techniques. Willemain will be one of a small number of experts speaking in the Augmented Decision Making track. 

Dr. Willemain’s topic will be “Coping with Regime Change in Logistics Operations.”

Dr. Thomas Willemain’s research at Smart Software and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute helps constantly innovate Smart IP&O, the company’s multi-tenant web-based platform for forecasting, inventory planning, and optimization.

About Smart Software, Inc.

Founded in 1981, Smart Software, Inc. is a leader in providing businesses with enterprise-wide demand forecasting, planning and inventory optimization solutions.  Smart Software’s demand forecasting and inventory optimization solutions have helped thousands of users worldwide, including customers at mid-market enterprises and Fortune 500 companies, such as  Disneyland Resorts, Metro-North Railroad, and American Red Cross.  Smart Inventory Planning & Optimization gives demand planners the tools to handle sales seasonality, promotions, new and aging products, multi-dimensional hierarchies, and intermittently demanded service parts and capital goods items.  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.  Smart Software is headquartered in Belmont, Massachusetts and can be found on the World Wide Web at www.smartcorp.com.

SmartForecasts and Smart IP&O are registered trademarks 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; E-mail: info@smartcorp.com

Smart Software announced today that its co-founder and Senior VP of Research, Dr. Thomas Willemain, has been selected to present at the prestigious MORS Emerging Techniques Forum December 4 – 5, 2019 in Alexandria, VA.

MORS is the Military Operations Research Society, funded by the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Office of the Secretary of the Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is to enhance the quality of analysis that informs national and homeland security decisions.

The Emerging Techniques Forum provides the defense analytic community with extensive content on emerging analytic topics and techniques. Willemain will be one of a small number of experts speaking in the Computational Advances in Analytics track. This track addresses new tools and techniques that leverage increased computing power and data availability.

Willemain’s topic will be “Validating Demand Scenario Generators for Inventory Optimization.” This research is part of Smart Software’s continuing work to push the state of the art in managing fleets of spare parts and hard to forecast items.  These advancements will be incorporated into Smart IP&O, the company’s multi-tenant web based platform for forecasting, inventory planning and optimization.  The research began with Dr. Willemain’s doctoral students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he remains active as Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

About Smart Software, Inc.

Founded in 1981, Smart Software, Inc. is a leader in providing businesses with enterprise-wide demand forecasting, planning and inventory optimization solutions.  Smart Software’s demand forecasting and inventory optimization solutions have helped thousands of users worldwide, including customers at mid-market enterprises and Fortune 500 companies, such as Mitsubishi, Siemens, Disney, FedEx, MARS, and The Home Depot.  Smart Inventory Planning & Optimization gives demand planners the tools to handle sales seasonality, promotions, new and aging products, multi-dimensional hierarchies, and intermittently demanded service parts and capital goods items.  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.  Smart Software is headquartered in Belmont, Massachusetts and can be found on the World Wide Web at www.smartcorp.com.

SmartForecasts and Smart IP&O are registered trademarks 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; E-mail: info@smartcorp.com

Tom Willemain to lead session and tutorial at 2012 INFORMS Conference to help military logistics personnel manage $70 Billion worth of parts & supplies

Belmont, Mass., October 9, 2012 – Smart Software, Inc., provider of industry-leading demand forecasting, planning, and inventory optimization solutions, today announced that Tom Willemain, vice president for research, will have two roles at this year’s INFORMS 2012 Annual Meeting, in Phoenix, Arizona, October 14-17. Dr. Willemain, who is also a professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will present a tutorial on managing spare parts on October 16, 8:00 – 9:30 am. He will also chair a session on “Methods Supporting Military Logistics and Testing” where he will also discuss “Accurate Forecasts of Spare Part Demand,” October 17, 8:00 – 9:30 am.

Operations and support of military hardware, which includes maintaining, refurbishing and overhauling, can be 60 to 70 percent of the cost of owning a weapon system over its entire lifetime, which can be decades. Improving the management of parts involved in those operations poses a significant challenge for the U.S. military.

According to a study by Deloitte Consulting LLP, the Department of Defense spends $70 billion a year on parts and supplies. Accurately forecasting spare parts is a major problem for any parts organizations because as much as 70% of spare parts have what’s known as “intermittent demand” which is very difficult to accurately forecast. This typically results in unbalanced inventories with many items overstocked and others under-stocked.

In a book titled, Transforming U.S. Army Supply Chains: Strategies for Management Innovation, retired Army Col. Greg H. Parlier, who is now a defense logistics consultant, has proposed “mission based forecasting” software tools that will help the military to stop buying things they do not need. Dr. Willemain’s experience has helped numerous companies with similar inventory challenges do just that.

Dr. Willemain has been at the forefront of research on better ways to forecast intermittent demand. With other colleagues at Smart Software, he holds a patent that provides accurate service level forecasts and estimates of safety stock and inventory stocking level requirements. Commercialized in Smart’s flagship product, SmartForecasts^®, the patented technology has helped numerous manufacturing, distribution, and service/spare parts organizations optimize their inventories, save millions of dollars, improve cash flows, and meet corporate cost reduction objectives.

INFORMS stands for The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. It is an international scientific society, with 10,000 members, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. To learn more about INFORMS or its annual research conference, see www.informs.org.

About Smart Software, Inc.
Founded in 1981, Smart Software, Inc. is a leader in providing businesses with enterprise-wide demand forecasting, planning and inventory optimization solutions.  Smart Software’s flagship product, SmartForecasts, has thousands of users worldwide, including customers at mid-market enterprises and Fortune 500 companies, such as Abbott Laboratories, Mitsubishi, Siemens, Disney, Nestle, GE and The Coca-Cola Company.  SmartForecasts gives demand planners the tools to handle sales seasonality, promotions, new and aging products, multi-dimensional hierarchies, and intermittently demanded service parts and capital goods items.  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.  Smart Software is headquartered in Belmont, Massachusetts and can be found on the World Wide Web at www.smartsoftware.wpengine.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; E-mail: info@smartsoftware.wpengine.com