Terra Technology announces the immediate availability of Demand Sensing 4.2, Multi-Enterprise Inventory Optimization 4.2 and Transportation Forecasting 4.2. Product enhancements improve supply chain performance across more diverse business situations and larger multi-national deployments to better serve customers, free cash flow and increase return on capital. New capabilities to process external information sources with “noisy” data provide a more accurate prediction of demand, even in volatile markets.

“Companies are struggling to improve forecast accuracy in the face of changing market conditions,” explains Steven Steutermann in Gartner’s November 2012 research report Supply Chain Research Roundup, 2013: Demand Management. “Demand volatility is making it more difficult to accurately predict demand. Economic conditions are changing customers' buying habits, the product mix within portfolios and baseline assumptions, and they are making it more difficult to forecast promotional volumes. History alone is no longer an adequate predictor of demand.”

New features of the products help manufacturers meet these challenges, counteract the costs of market volatility and lower the inventory required to serve their customers.

Demand Sensing

• New three-dimensional mapping capabilities provide flexibility to model items in complex distribution networks. This allows companies to support a wider range of business scenarios, better promote growth in emerging markets, and accommodate network changes from activities like mergers, acquisitions or divestitures.
• Increased engine efficiency provides additional scalability to accommodate larger global implementations, processing significantly more operations without increasing runtimes.
• New exception management features ensure meaningful results when using potentially “noisy” data from external sources, such as trading partners. Safely extracting predictive information from these data streams allows Demand Sensing to further improve prediction accuracy, especially in volatile markets.

Multi-Enterprise Inventory Optimization

• Enhanced modeling capabilities allow manufacturers to better meet retailer needs at the lowest possible cost by using customer-specific service levels for the same product within a single warehouse. By prioritizing shipments from the distribution center, manufacturers can fulfill service commitments with less total inventory.
• New flexibility features support a wider range of business scenarios and diverse distribution requirements found in global deployments. For example, storage constraints ensure that inventory is optimized without overloading smaller warehouses – a significant concern in emerging markets.
• Improved user experience provides richer visual interfaces and constraint validation and reporting, improving user productivity.

Transportation Forecasting

• Enhanced promotions modeling provides better visibility to promotional impact on shipping lanes. Unexpected jumps in transportation from promotions tend to be the most costly and disruptive for logistics professionals. Greater visibility helps shippers lower costs, improve efficiency and proactively collaborate with carriers to meet promotional needs.
• The use of retailer data to improve transportation forecasts is now supported. Manufacturers can further leverage demand signal repository investments to improve transportation forecast accuracy.

“Our customers are constantly changing to better serve retailers and consumers, managing continued volatility in markets, responding to growth opportunities and improving their product mix through acquisitions and divestitures,” said Robert F. Byrne, president and CEO of Terra Technology. “These product enhancements let manufacturers correctly anticipate orders across a wider range of global business situations and under any market conditions.”

About Terra Technology

Terra Technology uses better mathematics to sense demand, optimize inventory and predict transportation and warehousing requirements for some of the world’s best-known companies including Shell, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mondelēz, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Foods, General Mills, Kellogg and Campbell Soup. Terra invented demand sensing in 2002 and was the first company to use retailer data systematically to improve supply chain efficiency, enhance service, cut inventory and reduce waste. Information on how Terra enables a truly integrated supply chain can be found at terratechnology.com.