ILOG Empowers Companies to Deal with Rising Transportation and Inventory Supply Chain Costs

ILOG Inventory Analyst 7.0 and ILOG Product Flow Optimizer 7.0 Bring Unprecedented Ease of Use, Sophisticated Optimization Technology and Flexible Reporting to Supply Chain Customers

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and PARIS, June 11, 2008 – ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) today unveiled ILOG LogicTools Inventory Analyst 7.0® and ILOG LogicTools Product Flow Optimizer 7.0®, the latest versions of ILOG’s LogicTools Suite of Supply Chain Applications that help companies reduce costs while maintaining high customer service levels for manufacturers, retailers and distributors. The new release of ILOG Inventory Analyst represents a significant industry advance. The ease-of-use features address frequent integration issues that prevent organizations from adopting an inventory optimization tool. ILOG Product Flow Optimizer 7.0 allows supply chain managers to evaluate the trade-offs between logistic and inventory costs to determine the optimal path of each product from the distribution center to the customers.

The costs associated with storing and managing inventory are rising rapidly. According to the 18th Annual State of Logistics Report, published by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, inventory carrying costs rose 49 percent between 2002 and 2006. Globalization and increased complexity in supply chain management make it difficult to identify the true drivers of inventory costs. Tools like ILOG Inventory Analyst help develop global inventory optimization strategies to improve inventory turns and free up working capital, increasing cash availability as a result. ILOG Product Flow Optimizer enables the creation of stocking and distribution strategies that analyze trade-offs between transportation, warehousing, inventory carrying costs and service requirements, providing the optimal path of delivery from the source directly to consumers.

“While the value of inventory optimization is unchallenged, rising fuel costs have placed even more attention on every aspect of cost within the supply chain,” said David Simchi-Levi, professor at MIT, co-author of “Designing and Managing the Supply Chain” and Chief Science Officer at ILOG. “The ability to manage your inventory and customer service levels more effectively will reduce unnecessary expediting and hence transportation costs. ILOG’s Inventory Analyst 7.0 and ILOG Product Flow Optimizer 7.0 address these challenges, integrate easily with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions and complement ILOG’s advanced planning and scheduling software. The enhanced ease of integration and ease-of-use features improve the return on investment in inventory optimization and eliminate the barriers to broader adoption of the technology.”

World Kitchen, LLC, a long-time user of ILOG Inventory Analyst, has been using the latest version of the ILOG software. “Since upgrading to the new release of ILOG Inventory Analyst, we have seen significant improvements in ease of use and integration,” said Brock Cummings, senior supply chain analyst at World Kitchen, LLC. “Due to the new scenario wizard and data store import functions, the extract, transform and load time has been reduced by over 75 percent. Our safety stock solution includes our ERP backbone, SAP, MS Access, Sharepoint, and ILOG Inventory Analyst.”

ILOG Inventory Analyst 7.0 offers the following features:

• Ease of Use: The user-friendly interface allows the user to easily integrate with existing inventory data. The Data Store Table Editor enables quick setup of custom tables within a data store for customer-specific data. ILOG Inventory Analyst 7.0 also features Web-based optimization for easy deployment on a desktop or server with automatic population of inventory analyst scenarios.
  
  
• Flexible Reporting: Users can configure their own dashboards and reports to display information automatically populated from Inventory Analyst. The application will show historic and forecasted supply and demand, current stock, optimized inventory and projected inventory levels.
  
  
• Sophisticated Optimization: Optimization models include product shelf life and service levels. They also provide trade-off information between service, shelf life and costs. Shelf-life warnings alert users when a product will not likely reach its destination in time. ILOG Inventory Analyst 7.0 will automatically calculate unmet demand to better optimize the system.

ILOG Product Flow Optimizer 7.0 offers the following features:

• Transport Modes: In addition to evaluating multiple potential flow paths for each stock keeping unit (SKU), users may also evaluate different transport mode options along each path. This allows users to effectively analyze the logistics vs. inventory cost trade-offs within their network.
  
  
• Flexible Reporting: Users can configure their own dashboards and reports to display information automatically populated from Product Flow Optimizer. The application will display all the potential and optimal flow paths and the parameters associated with each.
  
  

About ILOG Supply Chain Applications
ILOG’s supply chain applications capitalize on ILOG’s 20 years of leadership in optimization technology and LogicTools customers, expertise and thought leadership. More than 250 companies use the ILOG LogicTools Suite of Supply Chain Applications for network design, production sourcing, inventory optimization, transportation planning, as well as production planning and scheduling. With the acquisition of LogicTools, the company founded in 1995 by David Simchi-Levi, Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, ILOG today provides solutions that complement Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and enable companies to make better decisions faster by optimizing their logistics networks and transportation strategy, setting safety stock levels for their sales and operations planning and improving their plant operations through sophisticated production planning and detailed scheduling.

A propos d’ ILOG
ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over 3,000 corporations and more than 465 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's market-leading business rule management system (BRMS), supply chain and planning and scheduling applications, as well as its optimization and visualization software components, to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than 850 people worldwide. For more information, please visit www.ilog.com

ILOG, ILOG Inventory Analyst, ILOG Product Flow Optimizer, ILOG LogicNet Plus, ILOG PlantPowerOps and LogicTools are registered trademarks of ILOG S.A. and ILOG, Inc. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.