Prophet 21 User Group Webinar: Inventory Planning Processes
Smart Software is pleased to introduce our new webinar, offered exclusively for Prophet 21 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 contact us to request access to the webinar. During the webinar, we will outline the challenges associated with traditional inventory planning processes and show how Smart Software can help. You’ll see a live demo of the Epicor Smart IP&O platform including the bi-directional P21 integration.
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!
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
Coping with Surging Demand During the Rebound
Many of our customers that saw demand dry up during the pandemic are now seeing demand return. Some are seeing a significant demand surge. Other customers in critical industries like plastics, biotech, semiconductors and electronics saw demand surges starting as far back as last April. For suggestions about how to cope with these situations, please read on.
Surging demand usually creates two problems: inability to fill orders and inability to get replenishment due to supplier overload. This situation requires changes in the way you use your advanced planning software. Here are three tips to help you cope.
Tip #1: Narrow your temporal focus
In normal times (remember those?), more data implied better results. Nowadays, old data poison your calculations, since they represent conditions that no longer apply. You should base forecasts and other calculations on data from the current situation. Where to cut off past data may be obvious from a plot of the data, or you may decide to set a “reasonable” cutoff date based on a consensus of colleagues. Smart Software has developed machine learning algorithms that automatically identify how much historical data should be optimally fed to the forecast model. Be on the lookout for these enhancements to the software that will be rolling out soon. In the meantime, conduct accuracy tests using held-out actuals using different historical start dates. Smart’s forecast vs. actual feature will support this automatically.
Tip #2: Increase your planning tempo
When operations are stable, you can set your inventory policies and trust them to be appropriate for a long time. When times are turbulent, it is important to increase the frequency of your planning cycles to keep old policy settings from drifting too far away from optimality. More frequent recalibration of your stocking policies and forecasts means that you’ll be quicker to catch trends that will surprise your competition and always keep you steps ahead. With software capable of automatically selecting optimal values, all that work can be done in one shot by the software. You should review those changes and possibly tweak them, but it makes sense to let the software do the bulk of the work.
Tip #3: Do more What-If planning
In turbulent times, you might expect even more turbulence in the future. Using your software for what-if planning helps you prepare for changes that may be coming. For example, suppose you’ve been in touch with a key supplier who hints that they may be raising prices or may have to slip their delivery schedules. By feeding the software different inputs, you can do contingency planning. If prices go up, you can see how responding by changing order quantities would impact your inventory operating costs and inventory investment. If lead times go up, you can see what the impact would be on item availability. This foreknowledge helps you figure out what your counter-moves would be before the crisis hits.
If there ever was a time when we could cruise on automatic pilot, it’s in the rear-view mirror. Your organization, coping with explosive growth, has many challenges. Old answers are obsolete; new answers have to come from somewhere, fast. Advanced software that leverages probabilistic forecasting can help, along with changes in planning processes.
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Why pick arbitrary Service Level Targets?
Why pick arbitrary Service Level Targets? Learn how to select automatically the optimal Targets @scale minimizing total costs for your business.
There are unavoidable tradeoffs between inventory cost and item availability. The Smart Inventory Optimization (SIO) app calculates all the key metrics to expose those tradeoffs. You can try “what-if” experiments such as “What happens to shortage cost if we raise the reorder point from 5 to 10?”. Better yet, you can let SIO find the optimal operating policy, e.g., the lowest cost combination of reorder point and order quantity that guarantees a 95% service level.
We often come into contact with potential customers who claim that they cannot use a forecasting system since they are a “build-to-order” manufacturing operation. I find this a puzzling perspective, because whatever these organizations build requires lower level raw materials or intermediate goods. If those lower level inputs are not available when an order for the finished good is received, the order cannot be built. Consequently, the order could be canceled and the associated revenue lost.
The three types of supply chain analytics are “descriptive”, “predictive”, and “prescriptive.” Each plays a different role in helping you manage your inventory. Modern supply chain software lets you exploit all three helping you to reduce inventory costs, improve on time delivery and service levels, while running a more efficient supply chain.
A new metric we call the “Attention Index” will help forecasters identify situations where “data behaving badly” can distort automatic statistical forecasts (see adjacent poem). It quickly identifies those items most likely to require forecast overrides—providing a more efficient way to put business experience and other human intelligence to work maximizing the accuracy of forecasts. How does it work?
Smart Software VP of Research to Present at Business Analytics Conference, INFORMS 2021
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
Smart Software Joins as Sponsor of the International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF)
The International Institute of Forecasters and Smart Software announced a new association as part of Smart Software’s sponsorship of the International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF)
Belmont, Mass., March 2021 – Smart Software, Inc., provider of industry-leading demand forecasting, planning, and inventory optimization solutions, announced a new association with the International Institute of Forecasters. This sponsorship will enable Smart Software to approach leading experts in the forecasting field, including many Nobel laureates.
The International Symposium on Forecasting, presented by the International Institute of Forecasters (IIF), is the premier international event for professional forecasters. Since 1981, this event has been recognized for the important forecasting research presented there, and for having hosted highly respected experts in the field of forecasting. Smart Software will support the IIF’s initiatives to bring together industry know-how and experience with evidence-based research innovations.
The IIF has held this symposium every year for the past four decades in New York, Dublin, Prague, Hong Kong, Sydney, and virtually in 2021. The International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF) is the premier forecasting conference, attracting the world’s leading forecasting researchers, practitioners, and students. Through keynote speaker presentations, academic sessions, workshops, and social programs, the ISF provides many excellent networking and learning opportunities.
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
