New enterprise planning and performance management suite designed for complex manufacturers to forecast demand, manage performance against plan
Pleasanton, CA — April 1, 2005 — Steelwedge Software Inc., a provider of enterprise planning and performance management (EPPM) solutions, today announced the Steelwedge EPPM suite. According to Steelewedge, the EPPM suite is used by manufacturers of complex or configured products for forecasting demand across the enterprise.
"The Steelwedge EPPM suite used our investment in SAP and enabled us to move from planning in disconnected organizational silos to a collaborative planning process," said Seema Phull, director of Process and Technology at Enterasys Networks, a provider of secure networks for enterprise customers. "As a result, we were able to improve our forecast accuracy, move from a quarterly planning cycle to a monthly planning cycle and reduce our missed-revenue opportunity costs, while lowering inventory costs."
Phull added that Enterasys' planning process has been streamlined, enabling the company to gain more control over the planning process, eliminate the use of spreadsheets and letting its analysts spend time analyzing information instead of chasing data.
Steelewedge touts EPPM as being able to improve the demand plan by incorporating key inputs such as marketing budgets, sales pipeline opportunities and new product introduction plans. The result is a cross-functional enterprise-wide plan-of-record (PoR).
The EPPM suite then uses the PoR to give manufacturers an accurate view of their overall performance against the plan via metrics-based dashboards and scorecards.
Finally, EPPM drives a closed-loop planning process by supporting an enterprise-wide budgeting and financial planning process that ties to the demand plan and drives a proforma Profit & Loss statement.
"Forecast accuracy is one of the most important and advantageous supply chain metrics," said Lora Cecere, Research director, Supply Chain Planning & Execution, AMR Research. "According to our benchmarking research, a one-point improvement in demand forecast accuracy could yield a two-point improvement in perfect order performance. Organizations with better forecasts gain competitive advantage with a 35 percent shorter cash-to-cash cycle time."
