Originators Of DRP Awarded Patent For Breakthrough Technologies That Allow Retailers To Forecast Store Demand And Orders For Every Item Up To A Year

Benchmark tests for first practical retail time-phased planning system exceed all previously published benchmarks by a factor of 75

BURLINGTON, VT (PRWEB) October 27, 2003: Andre Martin and Darryl Landvater, originators of Distribution Resource Planning (DRP) and founders of Retail Pipeline Integration Group, announced that the US Patent Office has awarded them a patent for the techniques that allow retailers to forecast demand and calculate planned shipments for every item at every store and distribution center for a year in the future on easily affordable computers.

If you want to take costs out of the supply chain, you have to start at the store," said Andre Martin, chairman of Retail Pipeline Integration Group, educator and author of Distribution Resource Planning and Infopartnering, the leading books on DRP and retail supply chain planning. The store is the beginning of the information flow and the end of product delivery. Once you know the projected sales, inventory, promotions, receipts and shipments at all your stores and distribution centers for the next year, you can make better plans for how much space, labor and transportation you will need to execute your plan."

Previously published tests by established supply chain software suppliers have been limited to very short planning horizons on much more expensive computers ($2-3 million). Most of the other commercially available time-phased planning systems for retailers were designed for distribution centers," said Darryl Landvater, president of Retail Pipeline Integration Group. We engineered this system from a clean sheet of paper to be able to scale up to the largest retail volumes on readily available and affordable computer hardware. The benchmark tests we just completed show that the Retail Pipeline system can forecast and plan orders for large volumes of retail data over 8 times farther into the future and only requires about 12% of the hardware costs when compared to the best industry benchmarks published to date."

In a large-scale test of the first practical Retail Resource Planning system, 400 stores with 34,400 products per store were tested for a total of 13.7 million product / locations planning a year into the future on $350K of computer hardware. The benchmark test included updating on-hand balances, recalculating the forecasted shipments over a one-year planning horizon, releasing the next group of orders to be shipped and reporting on a comprehensive array of alerts designed to assist inventory planners on managing the massive number of store and item forecasts and shipments. The elapsed time for the benchmark was less than 75 minutes.

This is a linearly scalable hardware and software configuration," added Landvater, which means any sized retailer can estimate their computer hardware requirements from this benchmark."

The benchmarks were performed on four IBM p630 computers with 8 GB of memory each. The storage array was an IBM FAStT 900. The database used was IBM UDB V8.1 64 bit ESE with DPF. The operating system used was IBM AIX V5.2. The Retail Pipeline programs were run using Java 1.3 64 bit.

About Retail Pipeline Integration Group
Retail Pipeline Integration Group is a consulting and software company committed to improving retail customer service levels by introducing Retail Resource Planning (RRP) thought leadership and solutions to the retail sector. As the originators of time-phased planning systems over twenty-five years ago, Retail Pipeline Integration Group has developed Retail Resource Planning (RRP) solutions to extend DRP to retail. In contrast to traditional reorder point replenishment systems, Retail Pipeline applications forecast long term item demand for every store, aggregate the demand and use it to plan the resources inventory, space, labor, transportation and cash required to insure top quality customer service. For more information, please visit http://www.retailpipeline.com
    
Contact: Darryl Landvater, President, Retail Pipeline Integration Group; 800-663-7432; dlandvater@retailpipeline.com

Stuart Silverman: VP Marketing, Retail Pipeline Integration Group; 212-608-4060; ssilverman@retailpipeline.com
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