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DEMAND
PLANNING
Prevail 6.0 Café™ Modeling now Available
Areté Inc., a firm specializing in supply chain
management solutions, has announced that Prevail 6.0 is now
available and based on Café™, a powerful new
automated forecasting engine specifically developed to achieve
the highest levels of forecasting accuracy utilizing Areté's
own proprietary technology. Through the use of configurable
models and model hierarchies, Café works behind the
scenes to create extremely accurate demand plans.
Café methodically looks for subtle relationships
between different types of market information (Pricing, Promotions,
Exceptions, Trends, etc.) and constructs multi-leveled models
based on those that have historically predicted sales consistently.
Unlike many other demand planning tools, Café imposes
no defined limit on the number of models or causal factors
that can be used in developing model hierarchies and regressions.
Café allows you to define and manage these model hierarchies
and regressions specific to the causal factors that drive
demand within your business. You can also offset these factors
so that demand plans can be driven off of events and pricing
that have either just occurred, or are about to occur. Café
intelligently uses these factors by detecting whether they
should be included for each demand combination one by one,
only choosing the factors that are driving the demand for
that specific combination.
Areté's approach not only works behind
the scenes, but also provides planners with the tools they
need to perform intelligent demand plan analysis. For this
purpose, Prevail 6.0 offers scores of new demand planning
process metrics. Planners can instantly define reports using
the multi-dimensional Meta-Query Engine. With this tool, planners
can select ways to view the data based on location, product,
market, or time hierarchies. The Prevail 6.0 Meta-Query Engine
makes it simple to create reports including sales, forecasting
accuracy, and error dispersion grouped by category, location,
and timeframe.
Planners who wish to manage their own demand
models can refer to a wealth of analytical information for
assistance and edit the Café settings through a simple
user interface. Café allows planners to utilize simulation
techniques to find the best-performing Café configuration
for their business. Areté consultants are also available
to set up and periodically tune the settings as needed. Once
the Café settings are custom-configured, the system
will work behind the scenes to create the demand plans. Prevail
6.0 Café requires no additional daily tasks for the
Prevail user. Click
Here to download a PDF version of this article.
SUPPLY
PLANNING
Avail 6.0 with Safeguard™
Areté Inc., a firm specializing in supply chain
management solutions, has announced the release of Avail version
6.0 with Safeguard™, the latest in the Avail suite of
integrated supply planning tools. Avail 6.0 helps plants schedule
production, raw materials, material batches, orders, and deployments
to distribution centers, as well as provide historical inventory
reconciliation and variance reporting. Avail 6.0 operates
in an updated environment with an enhanced user interface
and more efficient administrative routines. In Avail version
6.0, Areté introduces an inventory policy management
tool and Safeguard™ technology that is specifically
designed to further minimize the risk of stock-out across
the source network. These new features assist planning managers
in controlling inventory levels while ensuring the highest
levels of availability for clients' most profitable products.
Significant new features in Avail version 6.0 include:
- Enhanced Safeguard™ Deployment generator designed
to further minimize the risk of stock-out across the source
network utilizing statistical methods based on demand plans
and related data
- Enhanced administrative options to facilitate maintenance
of the system
- New Inventory Policy management tool
- New jobs interface that facilitates the request, tracking,
and merge of data parcels into the Avail system
- Enhanced framework enables multi-form editors that allow
users to view multiple editors on one screen
- New Grid Toolbar that allows users to save custom window
arrangements
- Production Worksheet Reports now capable of displaying
comprehensive production run notes
Click Here
to download a PDF version of this article.
EXPO
Client
Next Generation Platform
Over
the last two years Areté has been designing and building
a next generation platform for supply chain management software.
The system consists of an intelligent 'thin' client, similar
to a web browser, communicating with a server handling business
transactions. We required something
more interactive than a simple web browser, with a more structured
communication protocol geared toward moving data, not just
documents.
Key Design Elements:
• Portability - The client and server are able to run
on a variety of platforms and do not require any single vendor's
proprietary environment.
• Full separation of Presentation and Logic - Adhering
to the MVC design was crucial in being able to separate the
Presentation layer (what the user sees) from the Logic layer
(where the actual data manipulation and calculation occurs).
• Minimum requirements on the client – Developed
with minimum requirements on the client in terms of memory,
CPU, and basic software maintenance. The new platform allows
clients to be launched on a user’s desktop without installing
vast amounts of software.
• Robust User Interface - The client has a fully functional
UI, with multiple windows and tabs, dynamically updated components,
and a rich toolset for interacting with the user.
If you are interested learning more about Expo, please send
us an email.
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