Success Story: Global steel manufacturer
Situation
Our customer, a global steel company, changed their business model from an all-inclusive manufacturer to extend their supply chain by buying more materials externally. This meant an integration of the Purchasing process into the S&OP planning process.
Critical Issue
Our customer was using hundreds of Excel files to support their Purchasing and S&OP processes. Connecting these Excel sheets to create one integrated planning process and overview would take forever, planning and maintaining these Excel files would be manual and error prone and the planning process would take too much time.
Reason
When a rigorous change of a business model with such an impact on planning, collaboration, and data to be used, a more robust planning tool is needed. The planning processes had to be merged, the planning tool to be integrated and decisions had to be made much faster with the same number of employees supporting the old planning processes and Excel files.
Capabilities
Our customer realized they need a more robust and scalable solution. The Head of Commercial Projects realized that they needed more flexibility and scalability to re-engineer models, hierarchies, and additional data sets to integrate to two main processes into one.
We provided
With our in-depth supply chain knowledge, our expertise of implementing cloud-based, scalable planning solutions, and our project- and change management expertise, we provided the right mix of business knowledge and technical expertise to implement a solution fit for the needs of our customer. By starting in one area (Demand) and extend to the other supply areas later, we were able to implement in a phased and controlled approach.
Result
Positive results were realised in different areas:
- More efficient planning: business was able to plan 2 – 3x faster and more efficient.
- Better analysis: creating a more holistic view of their supply chain and adding more data improved the ability for analysis and respond quicker to external events.
- One unified platform for sales and supply chain planning.
- With one platform, planners now have more accurate:
- Pricing.
- Procurement.
- Delivery forecasts.
