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 Awarded National Science Foundation Innovation Research Grant
New research to improve service and spare parts planning for the multi-billion dollar aerospace, automotive, high tech, and utilities markets
Belmont, Mass., November 28, 2012 – Smart Software, Inc., provider of industry-leading demand forecasting, planning, and inventory optimization solutions, today announced that it has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Smart Software will investigate new statistical methods to forecast intermittent demand, with the ultimate objective of helping enterprises worldwide reduce inventories by tens of billions of dollars.
The new research will build upon Smart Software’s patented solution for forecasting slow-moving or intermittent demand, developed with the support of a previous NSF grant. The current method, commercialized as part of the company’s flagship product, SmartForecasts®, evaluates historical demand for each item and establishes the optimum level of inventory that will be required to achieve service level objectives. The new research seeks to extend demand forecasting beyond individual products and parts, identifying and interpreting interactions across clusters of items whose demands fluctuate together.
The new forecasting capabilities will benefit customers in several significant ways:
- A more dynamic statistical model of parts will enable forecasts to better reflect a variety of external factors that include part usage by itself or in combination with other products, as well as the impact of macroeconomic and environmental factors.
- Research results will provide planners with a dynamic model of item usage, enabling planners to develop functional maps of the interrelationships of large numbers of parts. Knowing which parts have demands that co-vary can be useful in at least two ways. First, item managers can be assigned to work with coherent clusters rather than arbitrary collections of miscellaneous parts, and second, parts can be co-located in warehouses for more efficient storage and retrieval.
- Another benefit from this new approach will be improved forecasts of “aggregates” where intermittent demand is present, such as all items in a product line, or all items at a particular warehouse. Better forecasts of aggregate demand across groups of parts will also be useful for raw materials purchasing, as well as for financial planning when parts are a source of revenue.
According to Nelson Hartunian, president of Smart Software, “Any organization that builds or supports capital equipment experiences intermittent demand for some portion of its inventory. This grant is a terrific opportunity to impact one of the biggest forecasting challenges facing these organizations – accurately forecasting parts and optimizing inventories. Ultimately, the goal is to have the right part at the right place at the right time. The research we are undertaking will make this goal more achievable.”
The Small Business Innovation Research grant program from the National Science Foundation is extremely competitive. More than a thousand companies compete in a two-stage screening: one for intellectual merit, and the other for commercial potential. This Phase 1 grant is the third Smart Software has received.
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
