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Innocent Drinks Food & Beverage Focus


party sourcing, manufacturing and supply chain partners – have access to the same source of up-to-the minute data. However, as Innocent’s planning manager Tom Oliver explains, this wasn’t always the case. “We used to rely on a number of separate, silo- based systems for both the supply and commercial sides of the business,” he said. “Previously, our demand team would look at a calendar year mainly in terms of revenue forecasts. Similarly, our supply team would look to the next 0 to 6 weeks in terms of volume requirements on a daily basis. Because of the constraints involved, in 2006 we made the decision to put in place an IT change project focused on moving away from this more disparate methodology and instead linking everything together to provide a single forecast. We wanted all information to be available from all single source so each internal department or each third-party partner could have access to precisely the same data pool at any given time.”


Key objectives The IT change project was essentially focused on achieving three main objectives: to achieve greater demand forecasting and planning accuracy, putting in place a world-class Sales & Operations


Planning (S&OP) infrastructure, and to ensure that the same up-to-date business and operational data was accessible by everyone within Innocent’s supply chain, with nobody relying on disparate silos of information. “In essence, we wanted to ensure that both the business and operational side of our business were ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’,” said Oliver.


In order to achieve these requirements, Innocent realised it need to source a state-of-the-art demand management and S&OP solutions; one that not only offered all the functionality required but could also be easily integrated within a planned suite of in-house developed IT systems. Innocent initially spoke to around 200 potential systems suppliers back in 2006. This number was then reduced to 40 and ended up comprising a shortlist of 4. The decision was then made to source Oracle


Demantra as the company’s core forecasting tool. “This was largely driven





Our supply chain is completely


modular, so we have long-established relationships with the growers of the fruit we use for our products. We also have a blending operation, packing operation and a warehousing and distribution operation, and they are all run under separate supply contracts.” – Giles Carter, Innocent Drinks.


by Oracle’s ability to meet the full scope of the change project we had in mind,” Oliver pointed out. “We wanted to get to the stage where we had a single forecast available to internal departments and external business partners and had the perfect platform for world-class S&OP. We also wanted to be able to undertake bigger projects in due course, and Oracle Demantra came closest to satisfying all of these requirements – both in terms of functionality and ability to be further customised, enhanced or scaled-up as and when required.”


Innocent has grown to secure an 80 per cent UK market share in the smoothie market and now turns over in excess of £100 million per annum.


Flexibility The process of configuring, customising and fully integrating Innocent’s new IT infrastructure was undertaken by the company’s own in-house IT team together with a small group of external consultants during 2006 and 2007. Innocent now benefits from a combination of in-house developed software, Oracle Demantra and Microsoft Great Plains together with Excel for its MRP functionality – mainly comprising financial data, sales forecasting and inventory management. Innocent houses a number of quad core servers in its data centre for general data back-up purposes. It also relies on Microsoft SQL servers as its data hub. The company uses data cubes on top of the SQL database, which are accessed through a link to Excel. “This gives us a very flexible business intelligence tool, incorporating all of our cost, volume and revenue projections each week,” said Giles Carter, Innocent’s head of business delivery. “This data is then accessed by decision support, financial


www.logisticsit.com July 2011


MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS


IT 7


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