FusionOps Introduces Prescriptive Analytics For Supply Chain

SOURCE: FusionOps

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF, March 23, 2016 – FusionOps, the provider of the Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud, today announced that the FusionOps cloud platform has been extended to include pre-defined prescriptive analytics. Business users now, for the first time, have access to data science-backed recommendations that they can trust to optimize their inventory in order to reduce their operational cost and improve customer service levels.

While advances are being made in the realm of data science, companies struggle to apply these new analytics to achieve better results. Until now, companies that wanted to extract actionable intelligence from disparate data sources had to rely on IT and teams of data scientists who had only complicated software tools to compile, harmonize, and translate for the business users to then have the chance to act on it for the benefit of the business.

In addition to being cost and resource intensive, limited computational capabilities and the time required to do this data analysis, can compromise the benefit for the business that doesn’t have weeks to spare to make critical business operation decisions. FusionOps pre-built prescriptive analytics are integrated into its scalable cloud platform, meaning it leverages a massive compute infrastructure which leads to accelerated time-to-insights.  With FusionOps, the business user has access directly to the information to make decisions in days versus months.

“We continue to innovate on our Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud to deliver real results for our customers,” said Gary Meyers, CEO of FusionOps. “Delivering prescriptive analytics for inventory in addition to our existing diagnostic and predictive analytics is a natural evolution for FusionOps and a quantum leap for business users. We are opening the door to the latest in data science and putting it into the hands of people who need it the most: business users.”

Inventory Optimization Analytics Leads To Powerful Business Recommendations

The first application of prescriptive analytics is in the FusionOps Inventory application. Using FusionOps inventory analytics business users discover new data science-based insights:

– Reducing Working Capital by Minimizing Excess Inventory

The application automatically finds opportunities to reduce inventory without impacting service level. A graphical interface highlights opportunities for savings showing each SKU above or below an inventory baseline. For a CFO who is exploring ways to improve working capital by reducing inventory, he can use FusionOps to automatically run each product through millions of simulations to recommend the lowest possible inventory that achieves the desired service level resulting in inventory reduction and reducing working capital.

– Prescribing the Best Service Level Targets for Maximum Cost Savings

The FusionOps inventory application prescribes the optimal inventory quantity and service level for each product based on the demand forecast and balance of associated cost. In the case of a Vice President of Supply Chain, who wants to determine what service level to offer customers, using FusionOps, she is able to quickly understand the trade-off between the service level and inventory in order to design the optimal inventory levels around each product.

– What-If Analysis Prescribes The Optimal Safety Stock to Achieve a Desired Customer Service Level

Powerful ‘what-if’ analysis shows the financial impact of raising or lowering service levels. Planners can adjust factors such as cost, selling price and lead-time to understand risks and upsides with different scenarios.

The FusionOps Advantage

The new prescriptive capabilities for inventory are fully integrated into the FusionOps Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud platform. Users will immediately gain advantages over traditional inventory planning solutions.

– Integrated FusionOps Cloud Platform

As an application on the FusionOps Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud, the inventory application leverages clean, harmonized data from other FusionOps supply chain applications including sales, procurement, inventory, and production planning.

– Improved Accuracy

The FusionOps inventory application leverages key inputs from FusionOps predictive, demand forecasting that uses machine learning and imports external data. Additionally, with FusionOps’ Big Data capabilities users get more granular and accurate inventory planning results by being able to analyze an unlimited number of SKUs.

– Faster Speed to Insights

The inventory application with prescriptive analytics leverages the clean, harmonized data already available in the underlying FusionOps Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud platform. This eliminates the time spent on data preparation and harmonization.

– Self-Service For Business Users

Using prescriptive analytics, the application automatically recommends inventory and customer service levels in a user-friendly UI; no data scientists required.

– Intuitive, Powerful and Interactive Tool

FusionOps elegantly displays information in infographic and dashboard formats that are unique to the supply chain and are intuitive to us. It is 100% interactive allowing business users to run “what if” scenarios in real-time in order to gain speed and confidence for better decision making.

Customer and Experts Value Prescriptive Analytics

“FusionOps continues to bring innovations like the latest in data science to our business which helps us drive real results. We believe prescriptive analytics for the supply chain will have significant upside for us. By improving our time to insight, we can be more responsive to our customer demands as well as identifying ways to improve and innovate.”

–  Davíd Guzmán, CIO, H.D. Smith

“As more and more companies outsource their manufacturing, they are losing visibility of the variables that drive effective inventory management like lead time and demand variability among other factors. FusionOps is now changing the game by providing prescriptive analytics directly to business users where it has the leverage to drive both inventory-related cost savings and higher customer service levels.”

–  David Ginsberg, VP Supply Chain, Sonic Manufacturing

“FusionOps is leading the market in making data science available to business users. Inventory optimization is a never-ending challenge for supply chains worldwide. FusionOps cloud solution brings real-time visibility and uses data science to prescribe recommendations that will allow business to better balance the tradeoffs between cost efficiency and customer satisfaction, and ultimately to increase profitability.”      

–  David Atkin, Assistant Professor of Economics, MIT

About FusionOps

Thousands of users worldwide rely on the FusionOps Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud as the trusted source for getting actionable knowledge about their supply chain. FusionOps uniquely provides companies an advanced big data platform, embedded data science that puts advanced analytics into the hands of business users, and pre-built supply chain models specific to the supply chain that accelerate time to insights.