FusionOps, the provider of the Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud, today announced that the FusionOps cloud platform has been extended to include pre-defined prescriptive analytics.

Business users now, for the first time, have access to data science-backed recommendations that they can trust to optimize their inventory in order to reduce their operational cost and improve customer service levels.

While advances are being made in the realm of data science, companies struggle to apply these new analytics to achieve better results. Until now, companies that wanted to extract actionable intelligence from disparate data sources had to rely on IT and teams of data scientists who had only complicated software tools to compile, harmonize, and translate for the business users to then have the chance to act on it for the benefit of the business.

In addition to being cost and resource intensive, limited computational capabilities and the time required to do this data analysis, can compromise the benefit for the business that doesn’t have weeks to spare to make critical business operation decisions. FusionOps pre-built prescriptive analytics are integrated into its scalable cloud platform meaning it leverages a massive compute infrastructure, which leads to accelerated time-to-insights.  With FusionOps, the business user has access directly to the information to make decisions in days versus months.

“We continue to innovate on our Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud to deliver real results for our customers,” said Gary Meyers, CEO of FusionOps. “Delivering prescriptive analytics for inventory in addition to our existing diagnostic and predictive analytics is a natural evolution for FusionOps and a quantum leap for business users. We are opening the door to the latest in data science and putting it into the hands of people who need it the most, business users.”

The first application of prescriptive analytics is in the FusionOps Inventory application. The application automatically finds opportunities to reduce inventory without impacting service level. A graphical interface highlights opportunities for savings showing each SKU above or below an inventory baseline.   A CFO exploring ways to improve working capital by reducing inventory can use FusionOps to automatically run each product through millions of simulations to recommend the lowest possible inventory that achieves the desired service level resulting in inventory reduction and reducing working capital.

The FusionOps inventory application prescribes the optimal inventory quantity and service level for each product based on the demand forecast and balance of associated cost.  A vice president of supply chain who wants to determine what service level to offer customers, using FusionOps, is able to quickly understand the tradeoff between the cost of disservice and inventory cost in order to understand the optimal inventory levels around each product.

Powerful ‘what-if’ analysis shows the financial impact of raising or lowering service levels. Planners can adjust factors such as cost, selling price and lead-time to understand risks and upsides with different scenarios.

The new prescriptive capabilities for inventory are fully integrated into the FusionOps Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud platform.  Users will immediately gain advantages over traditional inventory planning solutions.

As an application on the FusionOps Supply Chain Intelligence Cloud, the inventory application leverages clean, harmonized data from other FusionOps supply chain applications including sales, procurement, inventory, and production planning.

FusionOps elegantly displays information in infographic and dashboard formats that are unique to the supply chain and are intuitive to us. It is 100% interactive allowing business users to run “what if” scenarios in real-time in order to gain speed and confidence for better decision making.

“FusionOps continues to bring innovations like the latest in data science to our business which helps us drive real results,” said Davíd Guzmán, chief information officer at H.D. Smith. “We believe prescriptive analytics for the supply chain will have significant upside for us.  By improving our time to insight, we can be more responsive to our customer demands as well as identifying ways to improve and innovate.”