Replenishment at the Speed of Retail

Sun, Manugistics tout improved performance for store-level replenishment solution

Sun, Manugistics tout improved performance for store-level replenishment solution

Santa Clara, CA — January 8, 2004 — Sun Microsystems and Manugistics Group this week announced a performance improvement for Manugistics' Store-Level Replenishment Solution by re-architecting the application to the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) running on Sun's Solaris Operating System on SPARC technology.

"The solution now gives retail customers a critical competitive advantage by optimizing their business processes and enabling them to forecast demand at individual stores, rather than large distribution centers that feed many stores," the companies said in a statement.

With a demonstrated 250 percent increase in performance over the previous version — which was written in C/C++ — the new J2EE technology-based Store-Level Replenishment Solution solves significant challenges facing the retail industry, the solution providers assert.

Previously systems could not handle the massive data processing needed to do accurate, timely demand forecasting throughout the complex network of individual stores, so retailers traditionally have done their planning based on large distribution centers that feed hundreds of individual stores. Consequently, the situation at the individual store is not precisely known, leading to spoilage of products, increased costs and inefficiency.

In addition, as radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is adopted by major retailers, orders of magnitude more data will be produced throughout the supply chain. The challenge for retailers will be to transform this data into useful business information.

Thus, the more data that is produced the greater the need for performance and scalability to extract critical business intelligence to enable a responsive supply chain. Sun and Manugistics believe that, in an industry where margins are razor thin and market demand fluctuates unpredictably, retailers can gain significant competitive advantage by accurately forecasting at the store level, gaining control over inventory levels and supply chain processes and controlling costs through the use of tools like the souped-up replenishment solution.

The configuration used in the latest tests includes Manugistics Store-Level Replenishment Solution, Sun Fire 6800 Server with 16 CPUs, Sun StorEdge 6320 System with 112 spindles and 8 GB cache, Solaris 9 Operating System and Oracle9i Database v9.2.0.4.

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