Briggs & Stratton, a Fortune 1000, $1.6B company, is the world's largest manufacturer of small, gasoline-powered engines. Its service division distributes items to 35,000 dealers around the world. It sells and services engines to 90 countries on all seven continents. Demand is dependent on weather conditions, so is highly seasonal. When Briggs decided to integrate and refine its after-market demand chain, it engaged Assiduo. At the outset, Briggs began gathering aggregate dealer-level demand history from its 29 independent and company-owned distributors around the world, in order to gain a more precise view of actual demand, close to the ultimate source. Assiduo implemented a module to process and validate this demand history regularly, as well as to handle automatically the hundreds of annual supercedures as the product-line evolves. Once the process for capturing downstream demand history was in place, Assiduo tailored and installed its multi-stage demand management solution to begin generating monthly statistical forecasts for a total of approximately 250,000 SKU-location pairs. The Assiduo and Briggs teams also worked together closely to refine cost models addressing major supply chain processes. This set the groundwork for customizing and then implementing Assiduo's proprietary multi-echelon inventory optimization engine to control inventory levels in second tier warehouses around the world, jointly with the main Milwaukee distribution center. Finally, Assiduo tailored and implemented a suite of supply chain intelligence tools based on data-warehousing technologies, incorporating a wide array of easily accessed business objects for analysis, as well as a series of extensive, user-directed graphical reports. Assiduo's decision-support systems have achieved significant financial benefits for Briggs & Stratton. As Peter Klug, Logistics Project Manager for Briggs & Stratton observes, "Based on the results of this project, we found our inventory levels at our distribution center going down by 25 percent. We found that our distributors were able to reduce their inventory levels by 40 percent. Beyond just reducing inventory levels, we've maintained our service levels at a very high rate." The net result was an extraordinarily short payback of the project investment. Says Mr. Klug, "At Briggs & Stratton we use an EVA-framework to do our cost-benefit analysis. And a successful project usually is EVA-positive in the first year. With Assiduo, we actually had real economic value added within the first six months." John Guy, Vice President & General Manager of Distribution at Briggs & Stratton assesses the project's outcome, as well as Assiduo's contribution. "We were looking to take our supply chain to the next level, to make it world-class, and Assiduo helped us get there." "Assiduo has some extremely intelligent people who designed a complex inventory management model for us to take significant costs out of our supply chain." Getting there, Mr. Guy further says, was "a collaborative process." "Assiduo tailored their system for our environment, and we gave them ideas for the type of information that would help us fine tune the business." In an environment in which flamboyant software industry figures have incessantly extolled single branded corporate systems, Briggs acknowledges having had some initial hesitation in plugging a best-of-breed application into the existing IT firmament. Mr. Klug admits, "Any time you take a system off to the side and plug it into your core system, which for us is SAP, there's a certain element of trepidation there. But with Assiduo, the installation, the interface-all of that-was quite easy. It probably represented less than 5% of the total project." The absence of complications of this sort, among other factors, enabled the project to hit important project management targets, despite the numerous customized elements in the mix. Mr. Guy observes, "We were pleased that the project came in on budget, and was completed before our season went into full swing." Mr. Klug reserves his strongest enthusiasm for Assiduo's use of advanced technology to address real business problems. "To me-I've got an operations research background-what really impressed me was the really cutting edge inventory optimization engine, and forecasting engine that they use." As for the impact of Assiduo's advanced forecasting system, over and above the well-known demand management system previously in use at Briggs, Mr. Klug calculates, "We were able to reduce forecast error by 28 percent, which was really an amazing reduction for us." Moreover, Briggs has discovered tremendous further intangible benefits to implementing Assiduo's system for the long-term. Mr. Klug suggests, "Something to keep in mind is the future benefits of having command of your supply chain, having the information to understand your supply chain better. And that really provides the information for improving processes, improving communication, improving all sorts of aspects of the supply chain going forward, far into the future." Briggs & Stratton Corporation is the largest manufacturer of four-cycle, air-cooled engines for outdoor power equipment, such as lawn mowers, pressure washers and generators. An authorized service network of more than 35,000 dealers worldwide provides service and genuine replacement parts for all Briggs & Stratton engines-powering more than 90 countries on all seven continents. Assiduo Solutions Inc. is a leading provider of tailored decision-support applications, focused on multi-echelon inventory optimization, demand management, and supply chain intelligence. Based in Toronto, the firm is managed by its founder, University of Cambridge and Bain & Company alumnus David Chennells. Its research efforts are led by Chief Scientist Paul Zipkin, Professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and an internationally renowned scientist in the field of inventory management.