Melting away delivery delays with a supply chain planning overhaul

The CPG industry is a brutally competitive market. Retailers demand consistent services and want products on time and in full to meet customer demand. But recent supply chain disruptions, including increased lead time for materials and geopolitical friction, are making delivering products on time harder than ever before. Plus, ice cream manufacturers have to manage a different portfolio mix and highly variable consumer demand every season.

A global CPG company faced declining OTIF service levels due to poor demand-supply synchronization and a slow, reactive network that identified risks too late, resulting in limited mitigation actions.

It needed a better-integrated operating model to connect finance, sales, and the supply chain seamlessly. Too many manual workarounds slowed down decision-making. Plus, it wanted to automate more of its operations and implement rules-based planning to manage an accepted degree of volatility in the ice cream market.

To accelerate this journey and to become the number one supplier of ice cream in Europe, the company needed a partner to help optimize its supply chain and improve its response to demand volatility.

We conducted a holistic assessment of the current state of the supply chain. With our findings, we designed an end-to-end operating model for planning, supply chain execution, delivery, collection, claims, and performance management. This centralized the company's supply chain operations within our Katowice supply chain digital hub.

Then, we developed and implemented a future-state organizational model to consolidate planning across multicountry regions (for example, Europe) to drive economies of scale and help the business share capacity in priority demand areas.

The goal was to create an interconnected ecosystem so the company could drive a high level of standardization, accelerating the deployment of advanced technology solutions.

To build this connected ecosystem, we introduced and embedded capabilities that:

• Automate as much as possible to streamline processes
• Improve the demand/supply reconciliation with early risk flagging
• Segment planning to categorize tasks as low or no-touch planning
• Use rules and confidence-based levels to guide planning
• Accept a degree of demand volatility
• Size the supply chain based on specific levels of demand volatility

And we helped deploy Kinaxis, a supply chain advanced planning system that enables technology-driven scenario planning and decision-making. After successful deployment with minimal disruption to the business, we played a pivotal role in its further adoption and optimization.

We also integrated AI and ML models for demand forecasting to manage the volatility of ice cream demand in peak seasons.

Our work has helped the client convert market volatility into business advantage. Headline benefits include:

• 12% increase in OTIF performance over five years – meaning every 3% improvement translates to a 1% revenue boost of over $120 million
• A 6% improvement in the dispatch rate in one year
• More available resources for the demand creation process because of improved operational efficiency
• A 10% reduction in inventory in one year through integrated advanced planning

We helped the company deliver, lead, and deploy its resources in a results-driven way. Building on this successful transformation that fostered trust and created incremental value, we expanded our collaboration to include additional supply chain operations and supplier functions.