May 12, 2004 -- PrimaSolve Systems will be launching its latest product, PRIMA Forecast at the NEXPO newspaper technology exhibition and conference to be held in Washington from 19th June 2004. PRIMA Forecast is a demand-forecasting tool for publishers – a solution designed to maximize 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 minimizing 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 modeling techniques over the traditional spreadsheet, to give more accurate forecasts for newspaper demand. PrimaSolve 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, PrimaSolve’s business expertise and TXT technology in planning systems brings a sophisticated forecasting system to the publishing industry Also at the show, PrimaSolve will be presenting its full suite of products, proven at many of the world’s top newspapers. Of interest to many attendees will be PRIMA Alerts, a system for generating alarms based on certain conditions occurring on any computer systems used in the newspaper plant. By monitoring systems for certain events, Alerts will notify users by a variety of means including PDA, email, pager, sms message, allowing rapid action to be taken. For example, a production manager can be notified when a press has been down for a period of time, or a maintenance manager wants to know when a certain fault occurs in the mailroom. PRIMA Alerts will operate with any SQL system or database, from editorial through dispatch.