EmcienMix

EmcienMix is the definitive Product Mix Management system. It provides your product team a view of how customers are buying using advanced automatic buying pattern detection technology. These buying patterns are then leveraged in the product mix optimization, forecasting and published into the EmcienMatch product suggestion front end.

EmcienMix provides the unified platform for your product teams that enables:

Sales and Ops Planning
SKU Rationalization / SKU Reduction
Option Level Forecasting
Option Reduction
Strategic Product Sales Management

The key to sales and operations planning for configurable products

Sales and ops planning is where the "rubber meets the road" for configurable products — where the challenges with product configurations manifest. The most significant challenge is that operations has to forecast materials based on what combinations they expect to build. As the number of build combinations grows, the chasm between operations and sales gets wider, which shows up in the wrong mix of parts. forecast_mix_vs_actual_mix

This can be best understood with a quick example involving a tractor product line. The sales forecast is 100 units for next month; the product has 3 engines with take rates of 33% each. So operations plans for engines — 33% with engine 1, 33% with engine 2 and 33% with engine 3. But due to market trends, when orders come in, 10 units have engine 1, 40 units have engine 2 and 50 units have engine 3.

This challenge exists because of gaps in current tools and lack of an effective process to manage S&OP planning.

The Tower of Babel problem: different views of the same product

Sales typically thinks of the product in terms of volume of units or financial targets. Operations has a parts or BOM (bill of materials) view of the product. Marketing/product management has a customer-facing features view of the product. The lack of a unified platform to unite these views leads to challenges in delivering products to which sales has committed.

EmcienMix™ unifies product views

Emcien offers EmcienMix™, a unified platform that provides an enterprise-wide product view. EmcienMix expresses the product in marketing features, with additional intelligence on which features customers are buying. EmcienMix also translates from marketing features to the parts view for operations planning and to the sales view for sales visibility.

The unified platform allows different business units to plan at the feature option level to ensure that operations can deliver on what sales has promised.

All business units can share a common product view driven by customer demand and market trends. This allows marketing to bundle features based on how customers are buying them. Product bundling greatly improves planning accuracy and product availability.

Sales can quickly gauge what feature mix is selling and improve sales forecasts with model mix and feature mix detail. This level of detail adds tremendous accuracy to operations planning, especially for long-lead-time parts and expensive parts.

A Game-changer in Product Mix Management

Customers increasingly demand more choice in the products they buy. This means manufacturers have to offer thousands of product configurations and try to anticipate how many of each will sell. Without accurate information on what to build, this process is like shooting in the dark. Forecasts are off, inventories build up and finished products sit for months with no buyers.

EmcienMix is a powerful, flexible software solution that delivers the information manufacturers need to make informed product mix decisions. A familiar browser interface and logical design make the solution simple to use. And because products change continuously, EmcienMix is designed to help companies manage their mix as often as they need — monthly, weekly, even daily.

EmcienMix™ creates a unified product platform

Four main players in managing products — product management, sales, operations and engineering — have to handle information around the same products, each from a different perspective. Engineering develops products, sales puts in orders, operations forecasts and builds units, and product management is responsible for direction and strategy with inputs from the others.

Engineering, sales and ops can’t communicate because they don’t have a common view of products based on customer orders. They lack a common view because their tools are different — PLM, CRM and ERP, respectively — and product management typically doesn’t have an appropriate tool. EmcienMix enables all four functions to share vital information by providing a platform that unites the separate pieces of the product puzzle.

Before

Different functions can’t share product information.

After

EmcienMix’s product platform enables all functions to speak the same language based on customer orders.

EmcienMix’s unified product platform provides shared product intelligence across product management, sales, operations and engineering based on customer orders. Each function benefits directly from EmcienMix’s core capabilities:

unified_platform

Download the pdf.

Monitor your Product Lines

Emcien’s on-demand software solution analyzes sales data to reveal product features that customers are buying by market segment and model. EmcienMix is able to do this as it is linked to incoming sales data, giving product teams up-to-date views of changing buying patterns, trends, recent orders and overall product direction. Other monitoring capabilities include:

Customizable dashboards
Scheduled email delivery of metrics
Buying pattern comparisons
Product feature and individual option trending
Market and product segment comparisons

Detect Buying Patterns

Your customers are telling you what they want when they buy your products. In addition, customers buy in patterns. Customers with similar needs will tend to follow patterns in what attributes they want together, if you can detect that, you can leverage it for all sorts of value in your sales cycle as well as supply chain. clusters

Your sales history contains the buying patterns of past customers and EmcienMix auto-detects them all. Simply by loading in historic sales for 1 or more years, EmcienMix will find what combinations of attributes, (known as option or feature "clusters") are popular together. It's this cluster knowledge that our Forecasting and Optimization engines leverage for sales and supply chain activities.

No matter what the size of the feature cluster, EmcienMix will detect it, share it with you and leverage it for sales product suggestions and forecasting accuracy improvements.

Optimize your Product

If your customers are buying in detectable patterns, and you are looking to streamline the ordering process, the product mix, or both, EmcienMix has that covered. Our patent-pending optimization engine allows you to optimize your product offering by simply telling it what you strategically want to achieve, it will automatically use the buying patterns found in the feature clusters to find the best way to achieve your goals.

EmcienMix can optimize your offering and handle:

Increase Margins
Reduce SKUs
Increase Inventory turns
Increase Sales Velocity
Reduce options / parts usage
Option Postponement
and much more...

Forecast Orders and Options

EmcienMix tracks buying patterns of options through time and as such can use that information to predict where options and clusters of options are going. Emcien looks at forecasting differently than most, we forecast complete orders. Time is another attribute to EmcienMix, finding patterns of options and time is our magic, predicting full orders in the future is our output. You can see full orders by month, or see it dissolved down into options per month. If you are an organization that utilizes a "safety stock" strategy, EmcienMix forecasting also runs the forecast multiple times and produces a Min/Max/Avg amount for every option in time as well.

forecasting_paper_image High Accuracy Forecasting for Configurable Products and Products With Variants

Slice and Segment Demand anyway you need

EmcienMix can start with a single data file of orders, but it's real long-term value is sending it a recurring file daily or weekly. If it has a feed it can provide a regular view of your key performance indicators (KPIs) and let you and your team manage and track your product any way you need to.

Demand Segments can be created on the fly to slice by any combination of the following metrics: segment_objectives

Product options ( ie. Models, Color, Sizes, etc.)
Customer options ( ie. Region, Dealers, Industry, etc.)
cost levels or ranges
price levels or ranges
margin levels or ranges
by time ordered, built, shipped or sold / retailed
order size
speed of supply chain (ie. days on lot, days to ship, etc.)
and much more...

Once you create a demand segment definition it is kept up to date and accurate as new orders come in on the daily or weekly feed. Segments can even be shared with the team, so one person can decide how the company will analyze the product and know that everyone see's the save "viewpoint".