Food and Beverage
Business and Inventory Challenges
In the food and beverage industry, out-of-stocks often translate into lost sales. Therefore, most companies are sensitive to maintaining very high customer service level goals. This puts operations departments under a lot of pressure, especially if they are caught between sales who wants outstanding service and production planning who controls the inventory. Traditional methods often don't work well in this environment.There can be a wide range of demand behavior from fast to slow movers. And even 4-5 days of inventory can consume a lot of volume. So with SKUs proliferating, keeping a good inventory mix can be important to utilizing available storage space.
Finally, most food companies must manage their inventories to insure product availability and freshness throughout their distribution network. They need to make sure the products customers want are on the shelves, yet inventories are small and fresh enough to minimize costs, spoilage and out-of-date product returns.
ToolsGroup's Unique Capabilities
In this environment, ToolsGroup has the ability to deliver stable, reliable and very high service levels, despite increasing pressure from product proliferation. In addition, we deliver improved short-term forecast accuracy, which is critical to achieving very high levels of service. Many ToolsGroup customers in this industry are already obtaining 99+% service levels.ToolsGroup solutions also address many of the specific needs of food and beverage companies such as handling:
- Product expiration constraints
- Vendor Management Inventory (VMI)
- Continuous Replenishment Planning (CRP)
- Complex multi-echelon network models
- Transportation constraints such as minimum shipment order quantities
- Rough cut capacity planning
Successes
ToolsGroup is successfully deployed at more than 20 food and beverage customers, such as:- Diageo (Liquor)
- Barilla (Pasta)
- Granarolo (Dairy)
- Casbega (Coca-Cola Bottler)
- And many others