Software Suite provides predictive intelligence.

Press Release Summary:



e.Intelligence Suite(R) 3.5 leverages organization's data warehouse as central information hub to run What-If analysis to better predict future demand. Pricing and Promotion manages profit margins, adjusts prices to reach margin goals, and evaluates impact of promotion. New Item Introduction sets appropriate allowance allocation for new items. Distribution and Assortment analyzes current demand variables to ensure right product mix is available at appropriate store.



Original Press Release:


e.Intelligence Announces Suite 3.5 for Predictive Intelligence: New Demand Planning Solutions, Net-Native Architecture and Performance Enhancements


Predictive Intelligence Suite Improves Demand Visibility and Accuracy to Drive Financial and Operational Performance

MINNEAPOLIS, January 22, 2001-e.Intelligence, Inc., a leading provider of Predictive Intelligence software, today
announced e.Intelligence Suite(R) 3.5 with three new enterprise-wide demand planning solutions - Pricing and Promotion, New Item Introduction and Distribution and Assortment; a net-native architecture; and enhanced performance functionality. The e.Intelligence Suite delivers Predictive Intelligence, the next-generation of business intelligence, by leveraging an organization's data warehouse as a central information hub to run "What if" analysis in order to better predict future demand. The new solutions integrate business processes with the e.Intelligence Suite to provide users with a common demand planning process for the entire organization enabling unprecedented visibility to improve demand accuracy, which ultimately drives financial and operational performance. The net-native architecture and performance enhancements make it easier and faster for organizations to share secure views of demand forecasts with other organizations such as business partners, suppliers and customers.

Demand Visibility Improves Financial Performance
Historically, demand has been managed department by department through a collection of silo'd spreadsheets that are unable to provide detailed product and customer demand visibility, are not integrated into any business process, do not provide common business rules and cannot provide organization-wide visibility. Organizations today need real-time insight into demand shifts and the ability to see and understand the impact of all demand drivers across the enterprise, so they can better manage product planning, pricing, promotion, merchandising, replenishment, and other activities that influence demand and their bottom line.

"Everyday, we read about organizations missing their financial targets because of a lack of demand visibility," said Rick Tanler, chief executive officer and president at e.Intelligence. "Organizations have to change their demand
planning process and leverage the data that already exists in their data warehouse. With our years of experience in data warehousing and business intelligence, we realized that in order for organizations to accurately predict demand, they required a solution that provides granularity of detail, scales to handle multi-terabyte databases and enables real-time updates to demand plans - thus the data warehouse is the most logical foundation to establish a common demand planning process."

The e.Intelligence Suite leverages the data warehouse's common business rules, hierarchies and metrics to accurately measure and manage multi-billion dollar demand on a real-time basis at the individual product and customer level. e.Intelligence Suite provides unprecedented demand visibility across divisions and departments as well as from a summary level (all products) down to the most detailed levels (individual product brands, by customer and/or by region) - all in the same consolidated view. In addition, users can perform "What if" analysis to determine the impact of demand changes on margins, product mix and price. The combination of enterprise-wide demand visibility, "What if" scenarios and ability to monitor plan versus actual performance in real-time enablesn organizations to swiftly manage operations in order to maximize profitability. Since updated plans are added back to the data warehouse, new data is fed to other operational systems such as CRM, ERP and SCM, to improve their
efficiencies. In addition, business intelligence tools can enhance their reports and provide plan versus actual performance on a monthly, weekly or daily basis.

Predictive Intelligence Expands Business Intelligence Market
Wayne Eckerson, director of education and research at The Data Warehousing Institute, segments Business Intelligence applications into three categories: "What was" knowledge, "What is" reporting and most recently "What if" analysis. "Most business analytical tools to date have focused on trying to make sense of events that occurred in the past. A key element of next-generation business intelligence is to use past events to predict the future. The e.Intelligence Suite is an exciting new product because it focuses on providing predictive intelligence,
complementing a company's existing suite of business analytics tools," said Wayne Eckerson, director of education and research at The Data Warehousing Institute.

Delivering Demand Predictability Offers Impressive Market Potential
"e.Intelligence addresses the need for collaborative demand planning with a unique combination of extensive data warehousing-based application experience, predictive modeling technology, and vertical expertise," said Henry Morris, vice president of applications and information access at IDC. "The imperative to optimize the management and delivery of products and services creates a need for the type of applications featured in the e.Intelligence Suite. The highly verticalized operations/production analytic applications segment should grow to a $2.4B market by 2005."

e.Intelligence Suite 3.5 Highlights
e.Intelligence is announcing three customer-specific solutions that combine distinct business processes with the power and flexibility of the e.Intelligence Suite:
Pricing and Promotion - manage profit margins, adjust prices to reach margin goals and evaluate the impact of a promotion at any level - total category to store/item level.
New Item Introduction - set appropriate allowance allocation for a new item introduction as well as determine the impact of cannibalization on the rest of the category.
Distribution and Assortment - analyze current demand variables such as economic factors, consumer preferences or regional differences to ensure the right product mix is available at the appropriate store. In addition, the solution helps organizations maximize their full product line distribution.

In addition, e.Intelligence Suite 3.5 offers the following enhanced functionality:
Net-native architecture - the zero footprint architecture provides an interactive HTML interface making it easier for
organizations to share demand information with remote sales offices as well as with other organizations such as business partners, suppliers and customers - with full security.
Optimized server performance - speed and scalability improvements help users receive their information in less time
as well as provide more detailed information which reduces decision latency.
Advanced visualization tools - create 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional charts.

Pricing and Availability
Pricing for e.Intelligence Suite starts at $190,000. General availability for e.Intelligence Suite 3.5 is in March 2002.

e.Intelligence Suite - Overview
The e.Intelligence Suite was designed to enable all decision-makers to actively participate in the demand planning process. The e.Intelligence Suite delivers Predictive Intelligence, the next-generation of business intelligence, by leveraging an organization's data warehouse as a central information hub to run "What if" analysis in order to better predict future demand. The e.Intelligence server creates a personal cache or a workgroup cache where both extemal and intemal users can update their demand plans and conduct "What if" and "What next" analysis. Original and iterative demand plans can be added back to the data warehouse, giving organizations unprecedented views of plan versus actual performance.

In addition, interactive alerts notify users of any relevant changes and allow users to update information directly to the cache through an email link or by downloading a static HTML page with spreadsheet-like functionality and sending it back to the cache. Key metrics can be locked and changes are dynamically allocated to the appropriate areas. Affected areas are highlighted so users can see the impact of the changes in their specific area. As all finalized plans are stored in the data warehouse, the information is available to other financial and operational systems.

The e.Intelligence Suite is comprised of three components:
* e.Collaborator supports the analysis and exchange of information with decision-makers. It also supports dynamic, real-time read/write and adjust functionality anywhere in your business hierarchy.
* e.Modeler provides an unbiased prediction, based on statistical models, to serve as the stimulus for "What if"
analysis. It also offers both time-series statistical analysis and data mining tools that can be used for predictive analysis.
* e.Administrator manages business process integration and handles security, reporting, user notification (triggers
and alerts), and metadata links for the data warehouse.

About e.Intelligence, Inc.
e.Intelligence provides Predictive Intelligence software that enables organizations to improve demand visibility and demand plan accuracy. The e.Intelligence Suite leverages an organizations' data warehouse as a common information hub, provides unprecedented demand visibility at all levels throughout the organization, and enables users to perform "What if" analysis to better predict demand. With e.Intelligence, companies see and understand the impact of all demand drivers - product by product, customer by customer - so they can better manage product planning, replenishment, merchandising, pricing, promotion and other activities that influence demand.
e.Intelligence also enables companies to share demand scenarios with their suppliers, customers and partners to establish time-critical performance targets and reach consensus on the required action, or "What next."

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