Powered Appliance Manufacturer
.NET Online Forecasting System
Industry: Consumer Products
(Durables)
Focus: Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Information Management
The world’s largest producer of powered
appliances for kitchen, cleaning and outdoor use sells 55
million products in more than 150 countries. Their North
American operation employs 20,000 people in the United States,
Canada and Mexico and generates more than $4 billion in annual
revenue. This segment of the business is organized into
divisions based on product lines. All of the products within
the lines are manufactured at 13 US-based plants. The Lawn and
Garden Equipment division manufactures nearly 300 products
within 10 product categories. Their largest North America
customer is a nationwide retailer selling products through
their 850 full-line stores, 200 hardware stores and a high
volume Web site. Sales between the retailer and manufacturer
approach $2.5 billion annually. For the past several years,
the retailer and manufacturer have shared critical business
information with each other to coordinate the forecasting,
ordering and production of lawn and garden equipment. To begin
each week, the retailer would provide their prior week’s sales
volumes, current inventories and forecasted sales volumes
while the manufacturer would provide their latest production
planning information. Information was maintained in a single
Excel spreadsheet for each product category that was shared
between personnel at both organizations. At the end of each
week, representatives from each company would meet to discuss
any discrepancies.
The two companies recognized the existing system of entering
and sharing critical business information through a single
Excel spreadsheet was inefficient. To populate the
spreadsheet, the data would first need to be extracted from
the internal systems of both the retailer and the
manufacturer, and then manually entered into the spreadsheet.
This process was often difficult and time-consuming. Each time
the spreadsheet changed hands and someone added more data, the
risk of data inaccuracy increased. Also, the Excel spreadsheet
had to be routed to numerous people within each organization
for their input. This routing process often took several days,
leaving little time for actual analysis prior to the weekly
meeting, thus reducing overall forecast accuracy. The retailer
and the manufacturer agreed the ordering and forecasting
process should be automated. A further challenge was to have
the automated solution in place in time for the spring buying
season — giving them just six weeks.
The desire was to streamline the process
to offer more accurate sales analysis information, to enable
better production decisions and to reduce the volume of
information to be entered each week. To retrieve the data in a
more useable and meaningful way, the solution would need to
incorporate analysis and reporting tools. The solution would
also require secured access to assure users were seeing
relevant data based on their specific roles. The manufacturer
recognized this as an opportunity to build a platform to be
used for other customers, with the forecasting tool as part of
a suite of several tools. Therefore, the architecture of the
new solution would need to be scalable, extendable and provide
security across product categories and customers. The
manufacturer called upon Genisys, a leader in the development
of business productivity solutions, to build their forecasting
solution in the allotted six-week period.
Genisys designed and developed an online forecasting system
to build and populate a data model that stores production
estimates, sales estimates and sales actuals from sources
within both the retailer and the manufacturer. Data is entered
online, as well as through a file upload process from the
retailer. This data is then calculated and displayed in a rich
interface through a number of reports and other online
displays that help both the manufacturer and retailer plan
their future schedules. The interface provides secured and
targeted access to weekly sales units, weekly inventory, daily
sales numbers for each SKU, promotion schedules and much more.
Because the technical environment and IT competencies of the
manufacturing firm are based on Microsoft technologies,
Genisys designed the forecasting solution based on the same.
The online forecasting system is a 100% Microsoft .NET
solution using XML for data exchange. Genisys developed the
system with ASP.NET for the user interface components, COM+
for the business logic components, and SQL Server 7 for the
data back-end, using Microsoft C# as the primary development
tool. Genisys developed an XML schema to support flexibility
and interoperability with various data formats, and wrote a
Windows service to convert uploaded legacy files to XML files.
The anticipated benefits from the online forecasting system
include better production decisions, reduced operating costs
of several million dollars annually and more accurate sales
analysis. An added benefit to the manufacturer is the
potential to use the system with other customers as a
value-added differentiator. The use of Microsoft .NET
guarantees scalability and extensibility for future customers
and product categories.
Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft IIS,
Microsoft SQL Server 7, Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft
C#, ASP.NET, COM
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