About the Client: Major US Manufacturer and Distributor

The Client is a manufacturer and distributor of food packaging and foodservice products, supplying packers, processors, supermarkets, restaurants, institutions, and foodservice outlets across North America.

Business Challenge:

• The current setup has no Integrated supply chain consolidated reports
• For manufacturers, not only is it difficult to predict the maintenance needs of equipment but also to determine the necessary inventory of spare parts for potential repairs.
• Increase availability of spare parts for servicing and repairing of machinery and manufacturing assets and reduce the cost of maintaining inventory

The Solution:

• Gather data from supply chain history for drilling, rigging, pipeline materials, other inputs, part failure, and part usage history, lead time history (for reorders), history of disruptions to supply chain, planned and the actual history of ramping of capacity.
• Establish an optimal freight cost model that can ensure on-time delivery.
• Characterize statistical properties (distributions and correlations) in parts demand and lead times.
• Understand and account for historical disruptions by leveraging data from SAP BW and flat files to leverage SAP Analytics Cloud (Analytics, Planning, and Predictive ).
• Link data sources with an analytics engine.
• Using the current state of inventory and chosen economic scenario, automatically set optimal inventory levels for all parts.   

Results and Benefits:

• Develop a flexible framework for using inputs of historical data, economic and manufacturing capacity scenarios, and predictive models to set optimal inventory levels by using SAC predictive tools
• Optimized inventory level-setting with fully quantified operating characteristics of expected cost and probability of stocking out