Belmont, MA, September 2021 – Smart Software, Inc., provider of industry-leading demand forecasting, planning, and inventory optimization solutions, today announced that will participate at the Microsoft Community Summit North America 2021 and preview it’s soon to be released Gen2 forecasting algorithms.

One of the most significant challenges executives now face is the increasing pace of business. In the past, forecasting processes typically ran at quarterly or monthly tempo.  Smart’s Gen2 methods harness daily transactions from Microsoft 365 ERP systems and represents a giant leap forward compared to traditional inventory planning and forecasting methods. Gen2 applies patent-pending probabilistic forecasting and machine learning methods expanding on Smart’s field-proven Gen1 modeling that has been so impactful for so many companies.

Most inventory planning teams rely upon traditional forecasting approaches, rule of thumb methods, and sales feedback to determine stocking policies and demand forecasts. Come by booth #1820 to learn about these approaches, why they often fail, and how the new Gen2 probabilistic forecasting and optimization methods can make a big difference to your bottom line. Whether you are a seasoned Microsoft user looking for new ways to optimize your supply chain, or are new to Dynamics Applications and want to understand how a planning platform can help drive revenue increases and inventory reductions, please stop by.

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 Disney, Arizona Public Service, and Ameren.  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.

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

40 years of Innovation for Demand Forecasting, Inventory Planning, and Supply Chain Analytics

Belmont, MA, June 1, 2021 – Today marks the 40th anniversary for Smart Software, a leading innovator of demand planning, statistical forecasting, inventory management, and supply chain analytics software.

Company CEO, Greg Hartunian remarked “Our success is built on continuous innovation. Our mission follows the path that our founders initiated 40 years ago; we provide cutting-edge analytical solutions that help our customers maximize sales and minimize waste.  We are enormously grateful to our customers who have given us their support, confidence, and trust.  Thank you to our partner community of resellers and consultants who have mobilized our growth and shared their expertise with us.  We are also indebted to our many employees, past and present, local and abroad, whose creativity and dedication have produced systems that are benefitting so many great companies worldwide.”

Smart, Hartunian, and Willemain was incorporated in June 1981 by Charles Smart, Nelson Hartunian, and Thomas Willemain, our visionary founders. The firm later incorporated as Smart Software, Inc in 1984 reflecting their shift from boutique consultancy to software.  Over the years, their pioneering work produced the first-ever automatic statistical forecasting system for the personal computer, a patented APICS award-winning method for intermittent demand planning, and most recently a cloud-native probabilistic forecasting platform. All have produced major inventory cost reductions and service level improvements for our customers.  To learn more about Smart Software’s roots and journey, please click here:

  Smart Software Company History 

“Smart gives us good information to work with.  The service level planning method has led to productive conversations between sales and supply chain and given us a common ground from which we base our discussions. People are feeling comfortable with numbers, and through our S&OP process we’ve been able to create buy-in across the company.”
Rod Cardenas  – Purchasing Manager, Forum Energy

“It was deployed as part of our implementation of a new centralized distribution model and highlighted significant blind spots in the original project plan. The accurate forecasts of stocking levels and SKU count provided fact-based data that allowed us to strategically phase the consolidation effort where warehouse space was at a premium.”
Eric Nelson – CPA, CMA. Manager, Parts Supply and Logistics. BC Transit

“Its easy for us to give suppliers information they never had before. Our suppliers can plan their production and work with their suppliers. That visibility has been invaluable. That’s where the real payoff will come. Not just reducing inventory or saving time on people managing the inventory but being more responsive to customers’ needs. To me, that’s the overarching benefit of this software.”
Bud Schultz – Vice President of Finance  NKK Switches

SmartForecasts and Smart IP&O have registered trademarks of Smart Software, Inc.  All other trademarks are their respective owners’ property.

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 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 Inventory Planning and Optimization is an integrated set of native web applications that provides a single, easy-to-use, scalable, environment with field-proven inventory and forecast modeling that optimizes inventory stocking policy and improves forecast accuracy. We hope you will be able to join us!

Dr. Tom Willemain to lead INFORMS session on Generation of Probabilistic Time-Series Scenarios

Belmont, Mass., March 2021 – Smart Software, Inc., provider of industry-leading demand forecasting, planning, and inventory optimization solutions, today announced that Tom Willemain, Vice President for Research, will present at the 2021 Virtual INFORMS Business Analytics Conference from April 12 – 14.

Dr. Willemain will present a session on Probabilistic Time-Series Scenarios, and how such scenarios are used, evaluated, and automatically generated using the statistical bootstrap. Frequently, OR models supporting business decisions are feed on massive numbers of probabilistic scenarios depicting future operating conditions. For example, with business operating at ever-lower levels of aggregation and ever-higher frequencies, demand planning and inventory optimization now use models fueled by scenarios representing the randomness of product demand at a daily scale. Dr. Willemain will discuss how even trivial decision tasks such as operator education benefit from large numbers of realistic training scenarios.

As the leading Business Analytics Conference, INFORMS provides the opportunity to interact with the world’s leading forecasting researchers and practitioners. The attendance is large enough so that the best in the field are attracted, yet small enough that you can meet and discuss one-on-one. The conference features content from leading analytics professionals, who share and showcase top analytics applications that save lives, save money, and solve problems.

Furthermore, to cutting-edge analytics content, the virtual analytics conference recognizes and prioritizes the need for quality “face-to-face” interactions, networking, and collaboration in a virtual setting.

About Dr. Thomas Willemain

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 Ph.D. 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 statistics, operations research, health care, and other topics. For more information, email: TomW@SmartCorp.com or visit www.TomWillemain.com.

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 Disney, Siemens, Metro Transit, APS, and The 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 have registered trademarks of Smart Software, Inc.  All other trademarks are their respective owners’ property.

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