Teradata Corporation, which focuses on data warehousing and enterprise analytics, has announced the availability of Teradata ‘Demand Chain Management’ (DCM) Release 4, with powerful enhancements in its user interface and workflow tools that claim to improve both efficiency and ease of use.
“The increasingly uncertain and dynamic retail environment is pressuring retailers to lower inventory, reduce markdowns and reduce stocks-outs with fewer resources than ever,” Blake Johnson, consulting professor, Stanford University, said, adding, “To win in this environment, retailers require advanced forecasting analytics at the store-SKU level and the ability to cost-effectively plan and execute their supply chains to deliver to this demand signal.”
Teradata DCM Release 4, Johnson claims, provides greater predictive foresight for ensuring the effective launch of new products. DCM is designed for retailers who understand the benefits of buying what customers want rather than selling and many times discounting, merchandise they have.
Ed Dupee, vice-president of global retail industry solutions, Teradata, said: “Teradata DCM features a sophisticated forecasting engine that supports an integrated allocation and replenishment solution. It enables the matching of supply to demand and the synchronisation of inventory from the store to the distribution centres and all the way to the vendor.”
Dupee said the enhanced DCM solution enables retailers to increase customer service levels by balancing inventory investment with customer demand.
The DCM solution forecasts demand for individual items for each store based on each item’s annual sales cycle, promotional demand and rate of sale. With this information, retailers can make more informed merchandising and inventory decisions. DCM leverages consumer demand data to develop sales forecasts of each item by location, weekly and daily. These forecasts recognise historical performance, are deep in seasonal and causal identification and respond automatically to the latest trends. The forecast is then combined with inventory and replenishment strategies, serving to pull inventory through the supply chain based on expected sales across each location in the network.
The new DCM release features an Intelligent Product Introduction (IPI) module. “Companies are constantly introducing large numbers of new items to their product assortments to fulfill ever-changing customer demands in pursuit of competitive advantage and sales growth,” Dupee said. “While these new product introductions are designed to attract new customers and drive sales, they also represent a challenge for retailers and their manufacturing partners as they try to determine demand for new products with the initial launch.” The module builds on existing DCM capabilities. It determines the best reference item or combination of items at store levels, leveraging historical sales and quick-start forecasts to support new product introductions.
Teradata also offers an “accelerate package” for DCM which bundles the core application with the Teradata database, platform, professional consulting and implementation services, reducing risk in implementation and delivering quick time to value.
— IndiaRetailing Bureau
