Continental Mills – A Recipe for Supply Chain Visibility
Challenge
With manufacturing and distribution centres across the United States, breakfast, baking and snack manufacturer Continental Mills needed more supply chain visibility to help improve resource efficiency and evolve its S&OP process.
Continental Mills wanted to move away from administration-heavy forecasting and introduce an IBP approach to significantly reduce the time and effort previously spent on number-crunching.
Solution
Continental Mills turned to Logility to provide an integrated business planning platform, which quantifies the business in a way that wasn’t possible in its spreadsheet-reliant days of the past. It needed a flexible solution to manage the complexities of a business operating nationwide and across multiple divisions.
Logility Demand Planning helps Continental Mills produce an efficient statistical forecast, while Logility Inventory Planning and Logility Supply Planning solutions allow the company to streamline its production planning process and design its distribution network.
Using Logility Manufacturing Planning to leverage dynamic safety stock calculations helps create a better manufacturing plan and maximise inventory investments.
The flexibility of the Logility solution allows all four of Continental Mills’ separate divisions to manage their business in their own way, while contributing to a comprehensive corporate view.
Impact
Logility’s digital platform has helped Continental Mills increase resource efficiency and introduced traceability into the forecasting process. Around 40 to 50 hours of spreadsheet manipulation has been cut from the monthly S&OP process since the introduction of the Logility software.
Inventory turns have improved by 20% and inventory write-offs have reduced from $1 million a year to almost nothing.
The Logility integrated business planning platform has improved data accuracy and visibility across the business, helping Continental Mills achieve a record service level of 99.48%.
According to its Director of Supply Chain Planning Michael Burke, the Logility stems has helped drive the culture change they were aiming for.
