“We’re investigating how we can utilize weather-related information and public data about customer behaviour.”


let in the production department. The Bluecrux analysis showed that it took considerably longer for products to be released from a filling line in our UK factory in Kettering than from a virtually identical filling line here in Wevelgem, Belgium. It turned out that the distance between the filling line and the sample storage location is greater in Kettering than in Wevelgem, meaning that the UK employees transfer samples less fre- quently. As a result, the products were being released up to half a day later. That’s a big difference, especially in the case of fresh products. So that’s how LightsOutPlanning helps us to identify focus areas in our supply chain.” Alpro now wants to feed even more pro- duction process-related data into the tool to enrich the digital twin and explore whether links can be found between certain process parameters such as the temperature and production reliability.


Sensitivity


Among other things, the Bluecrux tool has been developed to continuously cal- culate supply chain parameters such as lead times and production reliability as the basis for managing planning sys- tems. These parameters are usually set once when the planning software goes online and then never reviewed again. That can cause problems, especially


when the business changes dramatically. Decroos: “We’ve grown rapidly over recent years. How much stock must we hold to guarantee the right service levels now that we have more and more fill- ing lines? The next step could be to cal- culate the ideal target stock every week and then set that level weekly in the OM Partners software. We could perhaps do that by hand too, but it would take much too long. And let’s be honest – changing the parameters is the first thing we skip when things get busy.”


Another example is scenario analysis. “We can use our current software to model certain scenarios but it’s rela- tively time-consuming. Artificial


intel-


ligence enables us to broadly model all scenarios and then input the best one into the OM Partners S&OP module as well,” states Decroos. “And don’t forget the sensitivity of our forecast for certain product groups. Some ingredients have long lead times. Imagine that the fore- cast is 100. Will we have a problem if the actual demand turns out to be 200? Or 300? In other words, based on our current buffer stocks and delivery time agreements,


which percentage above


the forecast will cause problems for us? Experienced planners might have those kinds of insights already, but now new planners can quickly acquire them too thanks to LightsOutPlanning.”


Decroos hopes that this approach will give


Alpro’s planners more time to


spend on exceptions. For example, the tool could issue an alert if a pallet sud- denly spends longer than average in the warehouse, or if a customer normally places a weekly order but hasn’t ordered for the past two weeks. Decroos calls it ‘management by exception’.


Value of freshness


What about Alpro’s need for end-to-end supply chain visibility? “We’ve imple- mented


vendor managed inventory


with two food retailers, which entails us receiving data from them daily as the basis for managing their stock. We also give suppliers insight into the needs. A company like Tetrapak receives a monthly forecast


of our packaging


requirement for the next nine months,” says Decroos. He would like to receive even more data from retailers. “We’d like to know the value of freshness. Is there a link between the on-shelf fresh- ness of a product and the stock turno- ver rate? When do consumers decide to leave the product displayed at the front and reach for one further back, with a longer shelf life, instead? Ideally, we’d have to analyse the data from all the links in the whole chain to achieve full end-to-end optimization. But that’s still a long way off.”


33


SUPPLY CHAIN MOVEMENT, No.31, Q4 2018


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