Pleasanton, Calif.—May 21, 2013—Steelwedge Software, a provider of cloud-based Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions, made available its latest release targeted to help global manufacturers more quickly and accurately make supply/demand tradeoff decisions in the face of continual market change.
“The world’s leading manufacturers are recognizing that increasingly complex, interdependent businesses—and the plans built to manage them—will only survive with better agility and resilience built into them,” said Glen Margolis, Chief Executive Officer of Steelwedge. “This agility comes from a potent combination of company-wide insight and systems to put that insight into action. This release of our planning solution with cloud-powered analytics, apps and high performance throughput of big data is designed to help our customers better out-maneuver market volatility and drive growth.”
The Steelwedge Spring release extends the value of the company’s integrated business planning platform in three ways.
Steelwedge S&OP Insight: Now, the cross-functional data collected in the Steelwedge planning system is aggregated, analyzed and presented in top-line dashboards for iPads or smartphones as well as online and Excel-based dashboards and reports. With Steelwedge S&OP Insight, corporate leaders can review real-time aggregated summary content across divisions, geographies, hierarchies and units/dollars anytime on their mobile devices. With a dozen pre-configured best-practice metrics, Steelwedge S&OP Insight makes it easy to pinpoint exceptions and business KPI’s for further focus. Powered by its planning analytics engine, Steelwedge S&OP Insight combines online analytics and planning to deliver rich contextual planning intelligence in a fraction of the time of any other approach on the market.
Steelwedge S&OP Apps Architecture: Customers and partners can develop their own apps, built directly on the Steelwedge platform for seamless integration with the powerful demand, supply, partner collaboration and executive-level S&OP data that is captured in its single solution. Based on customer demand, the company also provides a set of pre-configured apps those for demand policy, segmentation and stocking strategy.
Big-Data-Enabled Foundation: Steelwedge invested in technology infrastructure to extend the cloud-based platform’s power to quickly process massive amounts of data faster for better decision-making on critical planning issues. Steelwedge customers tasked with tracking, managing and analyzing up to billions of planning details–from SKUs and components to suppliers and customer transactions–benefit from the newest technology enhancements delivered through the cloud without incurring the significant incremental infrastructure costs they would have with an on-premise S&OP solution. The recent Steelwedge infrastructure upgrades encompass investments in the following areas:
- Storage: faster reporting and analytics and faster planning (overrides and aggregation)
- Network: high throughput, low latency, quality of service and failover. Rapidly transfer large files with minimal latency
- Edge Caching: haster performance for remote users
- Memory and CPU: in-memory add-ons support columnar indexing of data and fast “what-if” analysis
“The big data tsunami is at the front of every business, supply chain and educational discussion,” said Blake Johnson, Consulting Professor, Stanford University and Founder of Aztra. “To create business value with it, however, it must be integrated with a company’s core processes and accessible to the people who manage them. Steelwedge’s approach to integrating data and enabling analytics is industry-leading, and is driving a sea change in S&OP.”
