Food & Beverage Focus Innocent Drinks
management and commercial, and it interfaces with our own MRP system to build up an accurate scheduling plan for third-party production.”
Required as part of Innocent’s initial IT change criteria, the process of revamping the company’s IT estate included putting in place an S&OP process capable of pulling together
data from every part of the business. The resultant S&OP data is then discussed at weekly and monthly meetings in order to ensure that both business and operational activities are fully synchronised and both working for the common good of the company as a whole. “Our S&OP system – part of the Oracle
Demantra suite – allows us to review our sales over the past five years of trading and compare this with the forecasts we have for future demand,” explained Oliver. “One of the ways we do that is to ‘slice and dice’ business and operation data in different ways. In this way, we can not only look at our total sales but also sales to a particular customer or particular channel, and generally pick out trends at wider or more granular levels.”
Partnerships Because Innocent doesn’t physically touch the finished products it has no need for its own warehouse management system (WMS), handheld barcode scanners or RFID. Carter elaborated: “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. All these third-party service providers run their businesses within the KPIs that we set. Therefore all the data capture and track & trace activities are undertaken by these outsource companies.” Carter added that Innocent also has a long-established relationship with Culina Logistics, who look after much of the UK general grocery supply chain industry. “Culina Logistics receipts and processes all of the orders that come in from our grocery retail customers, and we arrange despatch of products against these orders,” he pointed out.
Oliver commented that, with the revamped IT infrastructure, Innocent has largely achieved everything it set out to. “Because of the way all the data flows together from a single source we can provide the best view available to everybody within
our supply chain,” he said. “Our internal departments and third-party supply chain
partners therefore know that the
data they’re accessing provides the best view of the company and its requirements at any given time.” Oliver added that every team within the business is likely to use this information on a daily basis. “For example, the commercial team can review its past performance and manage its future forecasts,” he pointed out. “This can result in re-forecasting through Oracle Demantra, and the information can then be pulled through to the reporting tools. As regards our supply team, they use the system for short-term planning and for longer-term procurement decision making.”
Further enhancements During 2010 Innocent invited some of the Oracle team back to undertake additional improvements to further enhance and add to the functionality we already benefitted from. “These enhancements mainly involved further increasing visibility levels into our forecasts – looking at demand possibility and further supporting our S&OP processes,” said Oliver. “The enhancements mainly concerned additional bespoke work to fine-tune the system in the wake of having used the system for a couple of years. We now have the world- class S&OP processes we want and so are now focused more on continuous improvement – making adjustments to our IT infrastructure and our business or operational model as we and our market evolves.”
8
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT July 2011
www.logisticsit.com
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