Press Release

Automotive Aftermarket Importer Slashes Forecasting Cycle
Rampage Products Attributes Doubling Annual Sales to Accurate Forecast

Contact: Tim McGraw
media@avercast.com

For immediate release

Rampage Products began to make an impact in the Jeep automotive aftermarket in 2005, when founder Jeff Beckman partnered with Mike Deschenes, whom Beckman had worked with at Wolf Automotive. “I’m a distribution guy, and he’s a marketing guy,” Beckman, president of Rampage Products, said. Between the two they have been able to double their sales every year since.

“We’re niche marketers,” Beckman said. “We’re very good at marketing and we have a very strong network across the United States. Despite the economy, 2009 will be a good year for us.”

But with that kind of success comes the need for product planning. Rampage Products was far-sighted enough to use a supply chain-focused application when starting out. It did the job of tracking, creating and analyzing orders but required significant manual database aggregation and long batch runs. Even with a relatively small catalog, it was an increasingly time-consuming task.

While the company’s catalog grew and Rampage Products evolved from an import broker to a distributor of imported products, more tweaks were necessary to modify a system driven by weekly orders for an industry that has 90-day lead times. The company’s demand planning needs became more and more complex as it sought to fill containers more efficiently in order to remain stocked between ordering intervals, requiring even more time-consuming analysis.

“I had to do a lot of manual downloads out of our financial accounting system into the demand planning software requiring long batch runs, and transport the order data back to our MAS90. Every time I made a forecast it was a half-day affair, but now I can get my information in less than a minute,” Beckman said.

With that kind of response, Beckman is pulling ordering trend data daily. “We try to do orders twice a month,” Beckman said, “and if there’s not enough to fill a container we’ll do it monthly. But we still analyze it on weekly basis.”

More Choices, More Savings

The company’s previous home grown demand management system contained only a handful of algorithms from which it would make recommendations based on historical trends.

“Avercast has 185 algorithms that can be set up in a variety of ways, using a ‘personality’ as a way to curve it and skewing it toward current demand or smoothing it out so it runs out over time, or even flatten it” based on information you may have on that particular SKU, Beckman said. “It will pick an algorithm based on that personality or curve it to smooth items that may have short-term surge. You can also select a personality for an individual item or a group of items without losing the ability to drill down. We have started grouping our products by their demand profiles in Avercast, which allows us to update thousands of part numbers with a click of a button instead of individually.”

Avercast pulls data from the company’s MAS90 enterprise planning system and extracts sales and order history, on-hand inventory and on-order quantities. “Anything needed to generate a forecast,” Beckman says. “And it puts it onto one screen, runs a forecast and gives you a plan and scheduled results based on lead time, safety stock—again, anything that would be needed for a forecast.”

Simple Report Capability

“It is certainly very easy to use,” Beckman said, saying Avercast is “much simpler for me as a user.” Beckman says he does not believe he is using all of the available system features. “I have created several SQL reports from the data Avercast assembled, and the system’s Planning Report is very easy to use. There is no question I save time and spend a lot less time trying to get information out of the system.”

About Avercast, LLC

Avercast, LLC's Enterprise level inventory forecasting and demand planning software solutions are the world’s first easy-to-use tools for companies that want to optimize inventories based on true demand. Avercast's proprietary forecasting technology includes an industry leading 185 forecasting algorithms to handle product trending, sales seasonality, new product introductions, mature and aging products, intermittent product demand, low volume and slow moving products, product promotions, and much more. Avercast, LLC is headquartered in Rexburg, Idaho USA and can be reached at 208-538-5380. Please call or visit www.avercast.com for more information and/or to schedule a personal demonstration using your company’s inventory and demand data.

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