Boardwalktech Releases Collaborative S&OP Solution
Palo Alto, California – May 21, 2010
Boardwalktech announced today the availability of a collaborative S&OP solution built upon the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP) which includes application modules for product unit forecasting, demand planning, CPFR, vendor-managed inventory (VMI), promotion management, and other applications. Utilizing BCP’s patented, flexible database technology, Boardwalktech has delivered S&OP applications which match the unique requirements of its customers without forcing them to change the way they approach S&OP to accommodate the rigid data environments of typical S&OP solutions.
“Our customers have found that traditional database-driven applications do not provide the flexibility needed for a collaborative S&OP environment,” said JB Kuppe, VP of Marketing at Boardwalktech. “Our S&OP solution is built on the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform which is unique in its ability to rapidly accommodate changing business requirements. Only with this flexibility are customers able to continually adapt their S&OP environment which is a key requirement for a successful S&OP deployment.”
S&OP enables manufacturers to align the planning efforts of multiple participants across different business areas including sales, operations, marketing, and finance. S&OP should also include external partners including reps, suppliers, distributors, and customers. Today, these areas often work independently in their own system environments with collaboration limited to emails and meetings. They might have spent time trying to configure a single “connected” environment, but found out that this makes no one happy because the data requirements differ across the groups. This means everyone spends their time trying gathering and reconciling data rather than proactively managing their businesses.
With traditional S&OP solutions which offer a spreadsheet UI connected to a rigid database, the data model needs to be configured at the database level for each area and, once set, it’s hard to change. Only BCP provides a flexible, rapid process automation environment which uses the data model from a spreadsheet, including all the formulas and business logic, which can be used directly to rapidly configure and deploy multiple S&OP applications. This means you can not only connect all the different areas, but you can easily share data between different S&OP applications like forecasting, promotions, and production planning. Since BCP couples the flexibility of Excel on the desktop with a patented tabular database platform on the backend, manufacturers can have both flexibility and scale in one solution.
Using this powerful collaboration platform, Boardwalktech has been working with customers like Kodak, Coca Cola, Logitech, and others to deploy multiple S&OP applications including demand planning, inventory optimization, and promotion management. The results are impressive-- one customer was able to reduce penalties for stock outs by 50%, reduce inventories by 59%, and increase forecast accuracy by 20%.
About Boardwalktech:
Boardwalktech is a leader in Enterprise 2.0 Technology for business process management solutions. We help companies improve business results by providing a patented, next-generation database-driven technology platform that enables companies to automate existing and build new processes using spreadsheets as the user interface and the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP) as the backend.
Learn more at www.boardwalktech.com
Company Contact
J.B. Kuppe
650-618-6104
jb.kuppe@boardwalktech.com
Released May 21, 2010