Tenn. manufacturer adds solutions to improve customer service, decrease inventory through customer collaboration
Atlanta — June 7, 2004 — A. O. Smith Water Products Co. is expanding its use of solutions from provider Logility to include collaboration for better internal and external communications and planning for optimizing inventory based on accurate forecasts and lead times.
Headquartered in Ashland City, Tenn., A. O. Smith manufactures residential and commercial water heaters and hydronic boilers. The company is extending its selection of Logility Voyager Solutions and has also upgraded to the current version of Logility Voyager Demand Planning.
"Logility Voyager Solutions have helped our supply chain run more smoothly, and it is time to take the next step with the collaboration and inventory planning modules to gain additional benefits, including improving our customer service while reducing our inventory investment," said Jim Hutzel, director of logistics and distribution of A. O. Smith. "We also anticipate streamlining internal communications about our real-time supply chain performance and providing more visibility to our key customers, distributors and retail channels."
The company will use Voyager Collaborate, in conjunction with Voyager Demand Planning and Inventory Planning, to improve visibility and better synchronize inventory investments with desired service levels. Logility said that Voyager Collaborate is an Internet-based supply chain collaboration application that enables both company-wide internal and external collaboration to streamline and accelerate business planning among sales, finance, manufacturing and marketing, as well as external customers and suppliers.
Voyager Demand Planning reconciles demand history, orders, point-of-sale (POS) data and other information to produce overviews of demand by item, location, customer and/or group, while Voyager Inventory Planning is designed to calculate the optimal balance between inventory quantities and desired levels of service based on industry best practices, according to Logility.