Optiant Releases PowerChain Version 6.2
Optiant’s PowerChain 6.2 Increases Performance, Adds Advanced Demand Scenarios
Boston, MA (November 18, 2009) –
Optiant*, the premier provider of inventory planning and inventory optimization solutions, announces enhanced capabilities for the PowerChain software suite, now Version 6.2, that decrease the cost and time for deployment and increase performance.
Other enhancements increase security by requiring authentication, improve configuration management with historical audit trails in order to associate users with changes, and improve administrative functions such as allowing system administrators to see who is currently logged in and using each module. Having the ability to determine who changed configuration settings and when they changed enhances user accountability and traceability, which are quickly becoming major requirements of supply chain systems.
“Optiant continues to focus on satisfying our customers’ needs for faster processing of ever-increasing numbers of SKUs while improving workflow, usability, and maintainability,” said John Ruark, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Optiant.
Recent enhancements to PowerChain Planner continue the trend of providing more ways to automate target generation, including new controls that specify limits and calculation behaviors of demand and forecast error statistics. Automation capabilities are balanced by more control over additional exception types for reorder points and kanban cards, as well as the ability for supply chain planners to accept or reject targets on a SKU-by-SKU basis, determining which items get exported to their Advanced Planning or ERP systems and which do not.
Recent enhancements to PowerChain Inventory, Optiant’s solution for strategic analysis and policy setting, include new currency capabilities that can be used in various stages of the global supply chain model and performance improvements in the workflows that analysts have. Other enhancements include functionality to import and export with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
Other features offer support for more complex supercession scenarios, which are useful for accurately working with seasonal demand. For example, many companies package their products differently in various seasons, such as for holidays, and need the ability to understand demand variants from non-seasonal packaging to seasonal back to non-seasonal. They now have the ability to supercede one item by a second item, such as holiday chocolates, but then the original item returns and supercedes the second item at some point in the future. Users can control whether the forecast processing module will force future forecast for an item to be zero in the time periods in which it is inactive, or superceded by some other item. This provides much more accurate forecasting of inventory needs.
Dates can be displayed using their ISO-8601 equivalent in order to align the display of the inventory planning cycle with the production planning systems that use this format.
* Optiant was acquired by Logility on March 22, 2010.
About Logility
With more than 1,250 customers worldwide, Logility is a leading provider of collaborative, best-of-breed supply chain solutions that help small, medium, large and Fortune 1000 companies realize substantial bottom-line results in record time. Logility Voyager Solutions is a complete supply chain management solution that features performance monitoring capabilities in a single Internet-based framework and provides supply chain visibility; demand, inventory and replenishment planning; Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP); inventory and supply optimization; manufacturing planning and scheduling; transportation planning and management; and warehouse management. Logility customers include McCain Foods, Pernod Ricard, Sigma Aldrich, and VF Corporation. Logility is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMSWA). For more information about Logility, call 1-800-762-5207 or visit www.logility.com.
For more information, contact:
Justin Siefert
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Source: Logility
