Customer
The world’s fifth largest cooperative sugar group, processing agricultural raw materials into sugar, alcohol and starch. Their products are further used in various applications in the food, non-food and pharmaceutical industries.
Challenges
Due to the fact that they had a lot of different divisions each with their own sales organization, our customer decided to organize all their supply chain planning centrally. For this, the input from 100+ account managers was needed in a structured way. On top of that, they had a lot of historically different ERP systems, which made this unified demand planning a real challenge.
Solution
Based on historical sales information, a statistical forecast was generated for each combination of product families and market segments. Also, a commercial forecast was proposed for each customer SKU taking into account statistical forecast and fixed contracts. This enabled account managers to enrich the proposed forecast and team leads & sales directors to validate & update the forecast.
Results
A global unconstrained demand forecast as input for the IBP process
Visibility for the sales organizations on how the forecast is build up
A monthly demand planning process with workflow embedded
