CASE STUDY MICROVENTION

y Vanguard Software
CORPORATION

CASE STUDY: MICROVENTION

???The results are priceless
compared to the days before

???

Vanguard Software.

??? Farhan Jama

Sr. Manager for Operational
Excellence at MicroVention

About MicroVentio

MicroVention, a subsidiary of the
Japanese Terumo Corp., develops
devices and technologies that treat
vascular diseases and associated com-
plications, such as brain aneurysms.

MicroVention has grown rapidly since
being founded in 1997 and now sells
products in more than 60 countries
worldwide. The company continues
to introduce new products including
different types of stents, occlusion
balloons, polymer coils, and drainage
catheters. Based in Tustin, California,
MicroVention has expanded its
physical footprint to include
manufacturing and administrative
facilities in Santa Ana and Aliso Viejo,
California, and in San Jose, Costa Rica.

Challenge

By 2013, when MicroVention opened
its manufacturing facility in Costa
Rica, unit-sales and product-line
growth had already begun to outstrip
management's ability to meet global
demand cost effectively. The reason
was simple. MicroVention was
operating with inadequate
technology and outdated processes
for forecasting demand and planning
operations.

???Our planning process was based on
tribal knowledge, contacting
customers for their estimated
demand forecasts, and compiling
those estimates into Excel sheets,???
explained Farhan Jama, Sr. Manager
for Operational Excellence at
MicroVention.

Prior to August of that year, when
MicroVention implemented Vanguard
Software, sales and operations
planners had to hustle through
manual processes for gathering data
and preparing forecasts each month.
These processes were not only labor
intensive, but rife with guesswork,
input error and formatting
inconsistencies. The result was
unreliable sales forecasts, which led
to faulty demand planning, ill-timed
production scheduling, and
unsustainably high operating costs.

The company was not only wasting
valuable human resources on the com-
pilation and management of
spreadsheets, the output of those
spreadsheets was difficult to interpret
and unfit for critical planning
purposes. The situation had become
untenable.

MicroVention needed a unified,
enterprise-grade solution that could
reduce forecast effort, increase
forecast accuracy, and streamline
operations to reduce production
costs and maximize sales. To do that,
they would need an automated
system that could expand their
forecast capability with best-in-class
statistical methods. This would
enable planners to spot growth
trends, manage new product releases
and product transitions, and
understand product dependencies.

sales@vanguardsw.com www.vanguardsw.com