Celebrating 30 Years

ToolsGroup’s 30th Anniversary

ToolsGroup has been a supply chain pioneer from the very beginning, being the first to develop, adopt, and apply innovative new technologies and strategies. We were the first to engineer probabilistic forecasting, leverage machine learning in supply chain, incorporate multi-echelon inventory optimization, and provide always-on inventory analytics.

As we celebrate 30 years of customer-centric innovation, we’ve been considering the history of supply chain technology. As one of the most experienced supply chain software companies, we’ve seen (and driven) our fair share of modern technological improvements. Examining this long tradition of innovation within the industry, our hopes are buoyed for a world in which supply chain becomes a force for good, safeguarding the environment, ensuring customer-centric planning, and bolstering business performance for a successful, sustainable future.

After graduating from MIT, Eugenio Cornacchia started working in Draper Labs on a project for FIAT that had just built the largest automated warehouse in Europe.
He started to develop a new technology, a model that became a cornerstone of the SO99+ technology.
Over the next few years, Eugenio worked for Draper Labs and Alfa Romeo, until met Joseph Shamir.
1993

Eugenio and Joseph had the idea to start a new company during a train journey from Milan to Genova and back.
When ToolsGroup started, the market was dominated by big transactional/ERP systems that focused primarily on execution and left a huge space for reducing inventory costs and inefficiencies while improving customer service levels.
The fundamental principle on which ToolsGroup was founded was to provide value to businesses by creating a software product which could probabilistically model the stochastic behavior of demand and supply in a reliable way.
2007

ToolsGroup became the first to improve performance in supply chain forecasting with AI through an implementation at Granarolo. In those years, AI was becoming popular as a new technology able to understand and learn how market demand could be affected by a variety of external variables.
11 years

later SO99+ is still performing well and they were able to cut in half the forecast errors relative to promotional forecasts.
Over the coming years, SO99+ earned widespread industry recognition by Gartner, IDC and Nucleus Research, and countless awards.
2021

ToolsGroup acquires JustEnough and receives significant new growth investment from Accel-KKR.
In 2021, Accel-KKR acquired ToolsGroup, pleased with growth after a minority investment in 2018.
2022

ToolsGroup acquires Onera to extend its retail platform from planning to execution, becoming the first in always-on inventory analytics.
2023

ToolsGroup acquires Evo for industry-leading price and inventory optimization.