Demand-Driven Supply Chain Planning for Food and Beverage

Out-of-stocks in the food and beverage industry often translate into lost sales, making high customer service levels important. This puts operations departments under a lot of pressure to maintain accurate forecasts and a good inventory mix.  Also, maintaining freshness requires companies to make sure the right products are on the shelves, yet inventories minimize spoilage and out-of-date returns.

We help our customers reliably achieve these very high service levels. By offering demand-driven supply chain planning, we help food and beverage companies achieve sustainable fill rates as high as 99+%, yet with 20-25% less global inventory.

Our solution starts with best-of-breed forecasting. It features powerful planning models that incorporate internal and external elements such as: market trends, seasonal demand profiles, and promotion forecasting. Demand sensing acquires and fresh daily demand data for sensing short-term changes in the demand signal.  Demand collaboration brings together demand and forecast data from multiple sources in a web-based consensus platform. It supports both internal sources (such as category plans or marketing promotions) and external sources (such as from POS data). Inventory optimization and replenishment delivers high customer service levels, even across multi-echelon networks. It also addresses Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI), Continuous Replenishment Planning (CRP), product expiration constraints, rough cut capacity planning, transportation constraints such as minimum order quantities, and SIOP.

For a complete description of our food and beverage solution and our customer experience, please contact the ToolsGroup office nearest you.