In 1919, Isaac Carasso was on a mission. Utilizing cultures from the Pasteur Institute, he created yogurt to assist enhance the well being of youngsters with intestine points in Barcelona. At the moment, yogurt was not broadly identified within the area as a meals merchandise. As a substitute, he offered his product as a medication to pharmacies.
Over time, Carasso’s mission became a world, diversified enterprise named Danone that right now provides merchandise reminiscent of yogurt, soy milk, water, and adolescence and medical vitamin to shoppers in additional than 120 international locations. Danone manufacturers embrace Activia®, Dannon®, Mild & Match®, and Oikos® yogurt, Silk®, Evian®, and Aqua®.
Within the firm’s phrases, “For a century, we’ve been trustworthy to the unique objective, promoting wholesome, scrumptious merchandise tailor-made to the dietary wants and consuming habits of our shoppers.” And whereas Danone is succeeding in “nourishing individuals and serving to them maintain their well being,” one space of the enterprise wanted a well being increase that Carasso’s “drugs” was not designed to deal with: demand planning.
Greater than 120 ‘flavors’ to deal with
When your organization is coping with right now’s risky market, a wide range of merchandise, and a provide chain protecting 120+ international locations – every with its personal guidelines and processes – demand planning, together with forecasting, can get a bit gut-wrenching. And that’s very true in the event you’re utilizing handbook processes to assemble knowledge out of your numerous, complicated, and infrequently siloed ecosystem to do the planning/forecasting.
Such was the case with Danone.
A change in tradition
Danone needed to reply sooner and extra effectively to market modifications and improve buyer satisfaction. And a big a part of reaching that aim centered on having wholesome demand planning/forecasting processes. But, its present processes had been hampered by the corporate’s legacy handbook options and programs. So, the corporate put collectively its want checklist, together with the flexibility to:
- Align and standardize the planning processes, instruments, and knowledge between enterprise models, product classes, areas, and international locations
- Strengthen the planning course of by implementing a proactive, end-to-end, customer- and consumer-centric provide chain answer throughout its operations
- Remove handbook knowledge enter and automate knowledge integration
- Enhance visibility throughout the chain and ecosystem
Stirring within the secret ingredient: SAP IBP
Working with SAP and companion SAPTOOLS, Danone applied an answer that includes SAP Built-in Enterprise Planning (IBP) for Provide Chain that comes with machine studying (ML). Consequently, the corporate was in a position to verify off that want checklist.
By automating and standardizing knowledge enter and integration and attaining an end-to-end view of its provide chain, the corporate has been in a position to predict and plan for potential disruptions or occasions extra successfully. Improved forecasting has helped increase stock administration, decrease the danger of stockouts or overstocking, and cut back waste associated to inefficiencies.
Automating the handbook processes has saved demand planners numerous time and freed them as much as concentrate on extra productive critical-thinking duties, reminiscent of managing exceptions and reviewing portfolio efficiency, growing their worth all through the group.
In accordance with Danone’s demand planning supervisor in Italy, whereas SAP IBP provides superior know-how, the supervisor’s group has discovered the answer straightforward to make use of, which has helped enhance the group’s productiveness. “Consequently, doing cleansing, evaluation, and handbook changes is far simpler and sooner right now than it was once. Moreover, the ML for the dairy and plant-based enterprise is attaining an especially excessive stage of accuracy, making customers assured to work with alerts and exceptions. This has the double benefit of not solely offering correct forecasting but in addition saving time to concentrate on different strategic duties.”
‘Package deal information’
Presently, 42% of Danone demand planning is dealt with in SAP IBP. That works out to greater than 660 million forecasts generated weekly with the answer. Danone has decreased the time to generate forecasts by 40x and elevated forecast accuracy. The corporate has additionally achieved in some international locations a waste discount of completed items within the dairy merchandise class of 35%.
An award-winning tradition
For its achievements, Dannon obtained an Honorable Point out within the 2023 SAP Innovation Awards, now in its 10th 12 months. To get a much bigger style of what makes Danone an innovation chief, take a look at the corporate’s 2023 entry pitch deck.
