LLamasoft Demand Guru Helps Companies to Accurately Predict and Investigate Key Drivers of Demand

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (October 18, 2017) - LLamasoft, a global leader in supply chain optimization software and solutions, today announced the launch of Demand Guru, a new solution that empowers companies to improve their supply chain design and strategic business initiatives by incorporating powerful causative demand modeling.

Traditionally, companies looking to better understand and predict consumer demand have only been able to analyze historical sales and shipment data against expected market growth predictions or make simple blanket long-term growth assumptions. This leads companies to base decisions on information that could already be outdated or could be leading them to draw incorrect conclusions. With Demand Guru, companies will be able to quickly consider several key demand drivers, from seasonality, to trends, to product lifecycles, to business and external factors - and then test out various future demand scenarios, based on that information.

The solution enables companies to rapidly and accurately quantify which market factors specifically influence demand of their product - enabling more specific analysis and precise decision-making based on more accurate information. As a result, companies can explore more robust and complex demand scenarios and create an automated, repeatable process to capture changes and adjust as needed.

"With Demand Guru you can model different demand streams and create forecasts with that information. Demand Guru contains access to the data cube and it's a game changer. It has information on many causal factors which is not always readily available or readily accessible," says Amit Surve, DBU Supply Chain Design and Network Optimization Leader at Cummins. "Companies know the relationship between their demand and market specific factors for their business, but aren't always able to model the external macro level causal factors. Demand Guru enables modeling and filtering the relevant factors. In today's era, solving for demand is the first step to solve all of your supply chain design problems including capacity and inventory planning."

Key elements of Demand Guru include:
• Powerful Machine Learning Algorithms - State-of-the-art machine learning algorithms detect unobvious relationships and correlation patterns within your demand.
• Powerful Causative Modeling - Easily conduct exploratory demand modeling with the ability to build infinite demand models that capture all types of demand complexity, along with business and external influencers.
• Data Cube - Users can access an abundance of weather and economic time series datasets to identify cause and effect relationships that can help better predict short, medium and long-term future demand.
• Automatic Model Selection and Optimization - The solution automatically selects the most accurate forecasting techniques to project demand into the future.
• Exploratory Visual Modeling - Users can quickly model a variety of demand drivers and dynamically quantify their impact in an interactive, easy-to-understand visual manner, making it possible to share with executives across the company.
• Repeatable, Easily Deployable Workflow - The solution enables users to deploy and persist demand models across all LLamasoft's products and solutions through a repeatable workflow.
• Tightly Integrated with Data Blending Actions and Connectors - Demand Guru offers quick access to data blending tools, making it easy to manipulate ERP data into the format you desire to forecast.

"Accurate demand modeling is a crucial element of proper supply chain design," added LLamasoft President and CEO Don Hicks. "We built Demand Guru to improve understanding of customer demand drivers and patterns - including everything from procurement policies to seasonal trends, competitive moves and weather effects - so that better, more accurate decisions can be made earlier than ever before and integrated into the overall design process."

About LLamasoft, Inc.
LLamasoft supply chain design software helps organizations worldwide design and improve their supply chain operations. LLamasoft solutions enable companies across a wide range of industries to model, optimize and simulate their supply chain network, leading to major improvements in cost, service, sustainability and risk mitigation. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, LLamasoft is a leader in supply chain excellence and innovation, advancing technology focused on continuous improvement of enterprise supply chains for the world's largest organizations.

Media Contacts:
Lisa Hajra
LLamasoft, Inc.
Lisa.Hajra@llamasoft.com
734.418.3119 ext. 1400