Sales & Operations Planning

/Pet Food Manufacturer

Supply Planning For a Pet Food Manufacturer

How our solution helped a leading pet brand to improve its service levels and supply planning performance

Overview

Client is a pet food manufacturer based in the U.S. The processes used by the company to estimate future demand were manual and did not accurately account for increased manufacturing capacity and their ERP system was not a good fit for the company’s business processes. Hence, the purchase orders generated from the system were not optimal, leading to frequent stock outs and low service levels.

Merilytics partnered with the client to build a robust Sales & Operations Planning tool.

Created a comprehensive demand planning model to help predict future demand using advanced statistical algorithms taking into account seasonality, trend and promotions, and provided the flexibility to overlay marketing or sales team inputs
Estimated the final demand forecast by SKU and sales channel by taking into consideration the future product expirations, new product introductions, open sales orders and user overlays to incorporate inputs from sales and marketing teams
Developed a supply planning model to evaluate the manufacturing processes, account for production capacity & bottlenecks and recommend the production/supply schedule to meet future demand with greater accuracy
Estimated optimum order quantity to meet forecasted demand taking into account minimum order quantity (MOQ) constraints, vendor delivery lead times, safety stock inputs and plant efficiencies

The customized Demand Planning model helped the company to generate 30% revenue growth YoY
The outputs from the Demand models also enabled the team to plan supply more efficiently, by accurately assessing the net product needs to plan inventory and thereby improving the service levels
Our comprehensive Supply model positively impacted the supply planning performance. It allowed the planner to factor in the constraints during the planning process and identify key drivers of variation in inventory and production, to generate POs for optimum inventory and service levels.