Inventory Planning Processes: Challenges and Opportunities
Smart Software is pleased to introduce our new series of educational webinars, offered exclusively for Epicor Users. In this webinar, Greg Hartunian, CEO at Smart Software, will lead a 45-minute webinar focusing on specific approaches to demand forecasting and inventory planning that will enable you to increase revenue capture, improve service levels, and reduce inventory holding costs. Minimizing excess stock, equipment downtime, and lost sales requires the right planning foundation. Most inventory planning teams rely upon traditional forecasting approaches, rule of thumb methods, and sales feedback. Many companies struggle to keep up, putting businesses at risk when the insulation of a growing top line thins. Our Webinar at EUG discusses these approaches, why they often fail, and how new probabilistic forecasting and optimization methods can make a big difference to your bottom line.
Please join our webinar at Epicor Users Group, featuring Greg Hartunian, CEO of Smart Software, who will identify the main problems of inventory planning processes and show in a live Demo how to solve them.
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. Please register to attend the webinar. If you are interested but not can not attend, please register anyway – we will record our session and will send you a link to the replay.
We hope you will be able to join us!
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); E-mail: info@smartcorp.com
Spare Parts Planning Webinar for Public Transit Agencies
Spare Parts Planning in the Age of Covid: Problems and Solutions for Public Transit Agencies
Covid has wreaked havoc on public transit. Plummeting ridership, reduced capacity, unprecedented losses in fare and tax revenue, along with added costs to keep buses and trains safe have resulted in massive transit system budget shortfalls. APTA reports that even with two rounds of emergency funding, public transit agencies will face a projected shortfall of $39.3 Billion through 2023.
This webinar will address the need for transit agencies to reconsider traditional practices, find innovative ways to capture cost savings, and do so without jeopardizing service levels. Greg Hartunian, CEO of Smart Software, will discuss the particular challenge of spare parts planning, why traditional practices used today fail, and how inventory forecasting technology is being harnessed to optimize performance and drive significant financial return.
Greg will highlight the experience of Smart Software’s transit customers, how they’ve generated bottom-line savings, what they are doing to prepare for the rebound, and share a technology demonstration using transit industry data. Please feel free to review the content below. We have provided case studies profiling the use of our technology within public transit and a software review from APICS Magazine.
Transit Specific Content
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
Smart Software Senior VP/Research to present at Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Emerging Techniques Forum
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
Smart Software Executive to Speak on Optimizing Military Spare Parts Inventories
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
