Steelwedge for the High Technology Industry

“Steelwedge provides us with the cost effective tools to help us achieve our goal of providing our customers with the industry's shortest delivery lead-time while minimizing our aggregate inventory investment and exposure. Steelwedge will form the core of our planning environment”

Rob Bisaillon, Vice President of Operations at Inovys

High technology industry is characterized by

• Very short product lifecycles making demand forecasting a difficult process and inventory write-offs a major business risk,
• Rapid shifts in competitive strengths in the marketplace leading to revenue unpredictability and steep margin erosion
• Highly configurable products with frequent bundling.

In such an environment, frequent planning and ongoing performance tracking is the key to ensuring revenue predictability, margin preservation and demand forecast accuracy (and hence capacity commitment). It is hard to run a high technology business on a quarterly (or less frequent) planning process.

The Steelwedge EPPM brings simplicity, power, and flexibility to the planning process at high technology companies. Leading companies are using Steelwedge to improve their demand planning processes, resulting in shorter planning cycles and improved agility to respond to market changes. By leveraging its unique capabilities in product lifecycle planning, including creating demand plans for new products that have no history; creating demand plans for configured products by incorporating their attach rates, and enabling collaborating sales forecasting processes, Steelwedge is designed to support the key planning issues at high technology companies. In addition, leading companies are streamlining their S&OP processes and creating operations plans that meet key objectives—high customer fill rates, lower inventory levels, and on-target revenue and margin.