Harland Simon exhibits at SPEx March 2004

Harland Simon will be showing its latest product, PRIMA Forecast at the SPEx 2004 newspaper sales and promotions exhibition in Birmingham, England on 29th March 2004. PRIMA Forecast is a demand-forecasting tool for publishers – a solution designed to maximise profit through a better understanding of demand.

Accurately forecasting demand for products is a challenging process for any publisher. The number of copies a publisher sells each day depends on many factors – first order effects such as headline stories and promotions and also causal events like sports events, elections, wars etc. The publishers’ requirements are to sell newspapers to all potential customers, whilst minimising the number of unsold returned copies. To complicate matters, a number of constraints such as production capacity and contractual commitments to wholesalers impact on the publishers’ ability to supply the market.

This process of producing the right number of newspapers at the right time in the right area is made much simpler and cost effective if the demand for newspapers can be predicted. Even a small percentage drop in the number of returns, can have an enormous effect on profitability. PRIMA Forecast uses historic data and provides more sophisticated planning and modelling techniques over the traditional spreadsheet, to give more accurate forecasts for newspaper demand.

Harland Simon is using core technology from TXT e-solutions a world leader in its field of Supply Chain and Customer Management solutions especially for short lifecycle products such as newspapers. Together, Harland Simon’s business expertise and TXT technology in planning systems brings a sophisticated forecasting system to the publishing industry.

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For more information, please contact sales@harlandsimon.com