Comshare lifts CPG industry with BOOST Sales and Margin Planning; new brand and customer planning system for consumer packaged goods manufacturers

Business Wire, April 2, 1996

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 2, 1996--Comshare, Inc., The Decision Support Company(TM), today introduced BOOST(TM) Sales and Margin Planning, the first of a new BOOST(TM) suite of ECR-focused Decision Support applications for the Consumer Packaged Goods industry. BOOST Sales and Margin Planning is a versatile new software application designed exclusively for marketing, finance and sales executives in large CPG manufacturing companies who wish to grow market share, volume and customer profitability through more efficient planning.

"We needed an application that would support our planning and budgeting process," said Barry O'Neil, vice president, financial planning and analysis, Seagram North America. "We wanted our marketing and sales team to be able to determine price changes, create promotions and design effective distributor programs -- and immediately see the results on the bottom line."

"Comshare's BOOST Sales and Margin Planning application is fulfilling many of our decision support needs," he added. "We now can set accurate forecasts for every aspect of our complex sales and distribution process -- from high-level targets to detail cost items.

"High-level Finance targets are pushed down the product and market structure of the company and across time," continued O'Neil. "Comparison between these targets and the short-range forecasts from the market managers in the field is intrinsic to the application -- and key to our continued success."

"BOOST represents a most comprehensive package of planning tools," says Brian Hibbert, finance director of Bacardi-Martini (UK). "We see these as a means of greatly improving the effectiveness of our planning processes by ensuring consistency of brand, account and financial plans and allowing "what-if" scenarios to be tested quickly. This frees management time to consider the main business issues rather than getting tied up in process issues.

"Consistency avoids wasted effort and removal of the need to re-key data into several systems avoids error," continued Hibbert. "BOOST's advanced [neural net] forecasting techniques and their ease of use, particularly for modeling new product launches, are expected to be a major aid in improving the quality and usability of our forecasts."

BOOST is a brand and customer planning system for large CPG manufacturers that uses proven technology built on the Arthur(R) suite of decision support applications, Comshare's successful merchandise and store planning applications for retailers. It allows CPG manufacturers to:

Integrate marketing's brand plans with sales' customer forecasts and finance's margin goals, to produce consistent cross-functional plans;

Helps decision-makers to build more targeted plans that make the most efficient use of promotional and advertising resources, product assortments, new product introductions and pricing;

Instantly illuminates the effects of alternative plan scenarios on product, brand, customer, region, channel and consolidated margins, to produce more profit-focused plans.

"Unlike generic budgeting tools, BOOST has CPG industry expertise built-in to help sales, marketing, and finance executives to plan their total business more efficiently," said Steven J. Tonissen, senior vice president, marketing, Comshare. "And, unlike spreadsheets and personal forecasting tools, BOOST is an integrated system that dramatically shortens planning cycle times and removes the pain and effort of sharing plan data across the functional silos."

BOOST is a complete "whole-product" application that includes a fully-worked template CPG planning process, a flexible development toolkit and a "best-practice" training and implementation methodology.

These enable rapid system development for customers and maximize the quality of their implementations. In addition, to support the release of BOOST, Comshare has developed a CPG Value Added Consulting Program. High-quality, independent consultants with CPG planning expertise have been trained and certified to install and implement the BOOST system.

"Efficient Consumer Response programs demand close coordination and integration between all parts of the business," said Phil Turnbull, ECR Service Director, Kurt Salmon Associates. "BOOST provides the platform on which a successful ECR program can be built."

The BOOST software is a multidimensional planning system based on multi-user client/server technology and employing Essbase from Arbor Software. The BOOST Planning Client provides powerful and easy to use what-if and scenario analysis functions. It also uses neural net functionality to generate accurate forecasts and to optimize plans for maximum profitability. The BOOST server database is designed to optimize efficient storage and rapid consolidation of cross-functional plans. The BOOST server database supports Windows NT, OS/2 and HPUX. The BOOST Planning Client desktop is fully Microsoft compatible and can accommodate Windows 95, Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 3.1 (Win32s). It also can accommodate OS/2.