Silvon and Prescient team to bring visibility and analytics to retailer-centric planning
Prescient, a provider of supply chain planning solutions for consumer products suppliers, and Silvon Software Inc., a provider of analytic applications for business performance management, have formed a strategic partnership that will combine Prescient's retailer-centric demand planning solution with Silvon's business analytics software. Prescient customers will have greater visibility into retail demand data and Silvon users will be able to add Prescient's supply chain planning solutions to support collaboration programs with trading partners.
In the U.S., Prescient and Silvon already share multiple clients, including AAi.FosterGrant, Riviana Foods and Zondervan Publishing House. Joint clients will be able to take advantage of a completely integrated solution combining advanced supply chain planning with performance measurement and monitoring.
"Like many consumer products suppliers, at FosterGrant we base our forecasts on consumer demand information pulled from various retailers' collaboration hubs, including Wal-Mart's RetailLink and Target's Partners On Line," said Martin Temple, director of information technology, AAi.FosterGrant. "Prescient and Silvon give us the ability to pull consumer point-of-sale (POS) data from these systems and aggregate it into one corporate forecast and analytic solution. This consolidated view of consumer demand enables us to operate a more efficient supply chain and better meet the needs of our retail partners."
An increasingly competitive retail environment dominated by Wal-Mart has forced competing mass-merchandise, grocery and chain-drug retailers to differentiate themselves with new programs and initiatives in the battle for consumer loyalty. The current retail business climate puts pressure on suppliers to develop greater packaging options, offer lower prices and participate in a variety of collaboration programs such as vendor-managed or co-managed inventory programs.
Prescient's retail-centric collaboration approach will help alleviate this pressure by allowing suppliers to collaborate with each of their retail partners based on their unique requirements without compromising their own business objectives or incurring additional costs.
Silvon's technology platform and data repository complement Prescient's retail-centric solution by enabling users to analyze, access and store, retail-level data like POS data - product information collected by retailers when products are scanned through checkout. Prescient clients can now leverage detailed analysis of POS data not only to generate more accurate demand plans, but also to measure their success based on the supply chain performance metrics for which retailers are holding them accountable.