With roots 50-years deep, Murray Feiss Industries is an award-winning, lighting, occasional furniture and decorative accessory company that operates two divisions, each with a totally different business concept.

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Ted Anderson, a business analyst with The Bell Group, comments on the implementation: "We are now able to bring the manufacturing and distribution sides of our business together, working on the same set of numbers. Our next step in the project will be to integrate the Atlas Planning Suite with our e-commerce site, roll those orders into Atlas Planning Suite for demand planning and inventory optimization, and integrate with Great Plains for execution. This will enable us to implement a consensus Sales and Operations Planning process into our business."


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Bell Group wanted to better manage backorders, inventory levels and customer service by providing business analysts same-day purchasing and manufacturing information, keeping the business synchronized. To accomplish this goal, the company opted to replace its COBOL-based demand planning system with state-of-the-art technology that could integrate with its Microsoft Great Plains enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

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Retailers and Consumer Packaged Goods manufacturers are engaged in massive in-house data cleaning projects as well as fine-tuning supply chain functionality to improve communication and reduce costs.

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Demand planners at glove manufacturer Wells Lamont have put their finger on a way to bring new value to the company by leveraging technology that allows them to plan by exception.

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With over 2,500 employees, Wells' operates two ice cream plants and a milk-producing plant in Le Mars, and a milk plant and freezer warehouse facility in Omaha, Neb. The company sells more than 500 different Blue Bunny products across North America and in 18 countries around the world.

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Making sure products are at the right place at the right time is especially important when you're dealing with seasonal items and perishable food. That's why Gertrude Hawk Chocolates and Sunsweet Growers Inc. are spending their IT dollars on new supply-chain software that will help them forecast demand, schedule production, and better manage inventory.

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Forecasting demand, as much an art as a science, is never easy in the best of circumstances. But Greensboro, N.C.-based Syngenta Crop Protection faced at least one major hurdle in forecasting North American demand for its fungicides, herbicides and insecticides, according to Richard Herrin, manager for NAFTA planning and forecasting at the company: "We didn't have a forecasting process."

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Since 2002, Murray Feiss has been using ForecastX Wizard to generate all forecasts, regardless of data point, and upload them to its system. The software resides on a Compaq Proliant ML550 server. A built-in interface allows forecasts to flow into an Excel application used for data analysis.

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The need to maintain extremely competitive margins first drove electronics companies to contract out all of their manufacturing, distribution, and order fulfillment processes to global contractors. This in turn created the need to track component and product flow worldwide. As a result, the electronics industry is in the process of forging what is arguably the world's largest, most tightly integrated supply chain, linking semiconductor manufacturers to end customers so that a ripple in demand on the retail end reverberates all the way down to the fab plant in a matter of hours.
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Gertrude Hawk will use the Demand Management Engine to produce forecasts for all their retail stores, and will integrate the demand requirements plan with their legacy system. Once implemented, the application will provide significant benefits, including faster and more accurate forecasts, as well as increased efficiency and visibility.

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The near future for demand management software vendor John Galt Solutions calls for an ambitious new product suite, but the direction is fairly simple, says the CEO of the Chicago-based company: get better at marketing, and at packaging up long-standing capabilities. Anne Omrod, president and CEO, met with MSI at the company’s user conference in Chicago in August, and says John Galt Solutions’ new suite handles multiple demand management functions.

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Most manufacturers will recognize the forecasting tool that was employed up until the late '90s at First Alert, manufacturer of consumer fire and carbon monoxide detector equipment. It was an Excel spreadsheet, a giant, unwieldy one, probably 30,000 lines long with lots of subtotals, requiring manual updates every time there was a tweaking of the product line or a new customer. And most of the data came from 50 different sales rep organizations — sometimes very optimistic ones — that would fax in forecasts once a month for someone to key in.

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Annemarie Omrod considers herself a child of the Jersey Shore, where she spent almost every summer growing up. But unlike other kids, who passed their days playing on the boardwalk, Omrod usually worked two jobs--flipping pancakes in the morning and frying seafood at night--so she could save up to $3,000 during her teen summers.

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