Optiant Adds Customer-Requested Features for Admin, Portal, More

BOSTON, Nov. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Optiant, the premier provider of inventory planning and inventory optimization solutions, announces enhanced capabilities for the PowerChain software suite, now Version 6.2, that decrease the cost and time for deployment and increase performance. Other enhancements increase security by requiring authentication, improve configuration management with historical audit trails in order to associate users with changes, and improve administrative functions such as allowing system administrators to see who is currently logged in and using each module. Having the ability to determine who changed configuration settings and when they changed enhances user accountability and traceability, which are quickly becoming major requirements of supply chain systems.

"Optiant continues to focus on satisfying our customers' needs for faster processing of ever-increasing numbers of SKUs while improving workflow, usability, and maintainability," said John Ruark, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Optiant.

Recent enhancements to PowerChain Planner continue the trend of providing more ways to automate target generation, including new controls that specify limits and calculation behaviors of demand and forecast error statistics. Automation capabilities are balanced by more control over additional exception types for reorder points and kanban cards, as well as the ability for supply chain planners to accept or reject targets on a SKU-by-SKU basis, determining which items get exported to their Advanced Planning or ERP systems and which do not.

Recent enhancements to PowerChain Inventory, Optiant's solution for strategic analysis and policy setting, include new currency capabilities that can be used in various stages of the global supply chain model and performance improvements in the workflows that analysts have. Other enhancements include functionality to import and export with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Other features offer support for more complex supercession scenarios, which are useful for accurately working with seasonal demand. For example, many companies package their products differently in various seasons, such as for holidays, and need the ability to understand demand variants from non-seasonal packaging to seasonal back to non-seasonal. They now have the ability to supercede one item by a second item, such as holiday chocolates, but then the original item returns and supercedes the second item at some point in the future. Users can control whether the forecast processing module will force future forecast for an item to be zero in the time periods in which it is inactive, or superceded by some other item. This provides much more accurate forecasting of inventory needs.

Dates can be displayed using their ISO-8601 equivalent in order to align the display of the inventory planning cycle with the production planning systems that use this format.

About Optiant

Optiant, a premier provider of inventory optimization, supply chain network design, and supply chain business intelligence solutions, helps Global 2000 companies optimize bottom-line performance by reducing inventories, freeing up working capital, optimizing supply chain asset utilization and delivering lowest total supply chain costs.

Optiant's PowerChain® solutions optimally balance resources, total costs, and customer service across the entire, extended supply chain to deliver greater profitability, increased customer satisfaction, more efficient use of capital, and a resilient supply chain that fully handles uncertainty in supply and demand. Optiant has transformed supply chains for the world's leading manufacturers including Procter & Gamble, Kraft, HP, IKEA, Microsoft and Boston Scientific.

Delivering millions of dollars in returns, Optiant's solutions for consumer product, high tech manufacturing and industrial organizations generate quantifiable savings, often within 90 days of implementation. Optiant's solutions, certified for integration by SAP and other ERP systems, are based on award-winning research from MIT and decades of experience dedicated to the identification and realization of supply chain efficiencies. For more information, please visit http://www.optiant.com.

Optiant, the Optiant logo, and PowerChain® are registered trademarks of Optiant, Inc. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

    CONTACT: John Brewer
             +1 781 238 4165
             john [dot] brewer [at] optiant [dot] com

             Becky Boyd
             MediaFirst PR - Atlanta
             +1 770 642 2080 x 214
             becky@mediafirst.net

SOURCE Optiant

Back to top

RELATED LINKS
http://www.optiant.com