Smart Software Celebrates 40 years

    BELMONT, MA, June 02, 2021 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Today marks the 40th anniversary for Smart Software, a leading innovator of demand planning, statistical forecasting, inventory management, and supply chain analytics software.

Company CEO, Greg Hartunian remarked "Our success is built on continuous innovation. Our mission follows the path that our founders initiated 40 years ago; we provide cutting-edge analytical solutions that help our customers maximize sales and minimize waste. We are enormously grateful to our customers who have given us their support, confidence, and trust. Thank you to our partner community of resellers and consultants who have mobilized our growth and shared their expertise with us. We are also indebted to our many employees, past and present, local and abroad, whose creativity and dedication have produced systems that are benefitting so many great companies worldwide."

Smart, Hartunian, and Willemain was incorporated in June 1981 by Charles Smart, Nelson Hartunian, and Thomas Willemain, our visionary founders. The firm later incorporated as Smart Software, Inc reflecting their shift from boutique consultancy to software. The team pooled profits from its consulting business, personal savings, and private placement investments from friends and family to focus on developing a state-of-the-art forecasting solution for the IBM PC. Two math professors from Northeastern University were recruited and became valued consultants. Smart Software, Inc. was born, and the company's first software product, SmartForecasts®, was introduced to the market in the summer of 1984, becoming the world's first automatic business forecasting system for the PC.

At that time, nothing was settled in the microcomputer technology realm. There were dozens of PC makers and several competing operating systems (there were four different operating systems, including DOS, available on the first IBM PC). Despite all the overhead that goes along with building software with no clear operating system standard, the team successfully launched a product with multiple innovations.

SmartForecasts was the first PC forecasting software that automatically selected the most appropriate statistical forecasting solution by running a tournament among competing methods. And it did so using a sophisticated and computationally complex form of analysis—an approach that was not only more accurate than that in use in more expensive minicomputer software but also required absolutely no statistical knowledge on the part of the business user. However, recognizing that the incorporation of business judgment was a necessary complement to statistical data analysis, the team also made sure SmartForecasts included the first on-screen "eyeball" forecast adjustment capability. These and other innovations combined to make SmartForecasts an instant technology leader. Over the years, their pioneering work produced the first-ever automatic statistical forecasting system for the personal computer, a patented APICS award-winning method for intermittent demand planning, and most recently a cloud-native probabilistic forecasting platform. To learn more about Smart Software's roots and journey, please click here.

Smart Software Today

Today, Smart Software has hundreds of supported customers in a wide range of industries using its software products all over the globe. Multiple National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (NSF SBIR) awards helped underwrite several forecasting advances, including a US Patent for a radically different way of predicting and managing demand for spare parts and other intermittently demanded items. Most recently, Smart has developed probabilistic forecasting and machine learning methods that over the next several years will completely replace traditional "best fit" algorithms in the marketplace. Smart Software's headquarters remains in Belmont, MA.

Smart Inventory Planning & Optimization (Smart IP&O) was launched in 2017 as a cloud-native, multi-tenant, SOC-certified platform with inventory optimization that prescribes optimized stocking policies, analytics that uncover operational insights using machine learning and advanced statistics, supply planning to automate the order management and replenishment process, and consensus demand planning to support the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process. The platform includes multiple bi-directional integrations to many leading ERP, Asset Management, and E-Commerce solutions, ensuring that customer data is always accessible.

Although the founders continue to be active in various capacities, management and strategic direction of the business have passed to a new generation of leaders. Nelson's son, Gregory Hartunian, now serves as President & CEO, and Tom's daughter Katherine Willemain is an integral part of Smart's support and implementation team. Prepared professionally by his MBA from Babson's F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business and attitudinally by his background as a Division I wrestler at Syracuse University, Greg has assembled a talented and aggressive executive team, including CTO Sreekumar Menon, a veteran of several hi-tech startups, and VP Business Development Jeffrey Scott, a tech veteran and MIT Sloan MBA.

Despite the recent Covid pandemic, Smart Software continues to grow, hire talented new staff, develop exciting new algorithms, translate them into useful new products and enjoys the success of customers new and old. Today's Smart Software is proud of its deep roots in the industry, innovation, and longevity. "Not many companies, especially those in the software business, can claim 4 decades of innovation and success. Smart Software is field-proven and offers a differentiated set of solutions. We will continue to innovate, grow, and serve our customers in the years to come."

Founded in 1981, Smart Software, Inc. is a leader in providing businesses with enterprise-wide demand forecasting, planning, and inventory optimization solutions. Smart Inventory Planning & Optimization is a multi-tenant web platform that gives demand planners the tools to handle sales seasonality, promotions, new and aging products, multi-dimensional hierarchies, and intermittently demanded service parts and capital goods items. The solution provides inventory managers with accurate estimates of the optimal inventory and safety stock required to meet future orders and achieve desired service levels. Smart Software is headquartered in Belmont, Massachusetts, and can be found at www.smartcorp.com.

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