Honey Monster seeks the perfect forecast
Sugar Puffs and Poppets maker Big Bear is aiming to reduce its stockholding by 5% and give service levels a boost with a new demand planning system.
Formed in 2003 to buy Fox's Confectionery from Northern Foods, Big Bear is on a mission to buy and build under-invested, unloved heritage brands.
It has since snapped up Sugar Puffs and Harvest Cereal Bars in a bid to create a £100M branded food business suitable for a stock market flotation.
While its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system had a forecasting module, it was not very sophisticated, and required a lot of manual intervention, said Stuart Riches, group IT controller for Big Bear: “With our products now selling in more countries and across more channels than ever before, we needed a solution that could automate and predict total demand across all the products and all the seasons. This meant dropping the spreadsheets and streamlining our sales and operations planning processes.”
The company opted for a demand planning system from software giant Infor, which is due to go live in the New Year, said Andrew Kinder, director of product marketing, supply chain management at Infor. “Our system will enable Big Bear to build in far more data, particularly around promotions, and then analyse and interrogate the data to work out what is going on customer by customer, promotion by promotion, and so on. It will also significantly reduce the manual effort required to produce, evaluate and monitor sales forecasts.”
Return on investment was typically achieved within 12 months of the ‘go-live’ date, said Kinder, who works with several leading food and drink manufacturers including S&A Foods, Heinz and Carlsberg.
“What’s amazing to me is the number of companies out there that don’t have a formalised sales and operations planning system in place, when all the evidence is out there showing that they work.”
