Mission to create a Planning and scheduling function

A dairy cooperative of 1200 members with 3 factories, 824 people and a turnover of 347 million euros specializing in ultra-fresh, sells dairy products mainly with short expiry dates, made from the milk of its members.

The markets are both customers in RHF (Out-of-Home Catering), in GMS, in France, for export and for overseas export. All must be delivered by making the best use of the milk collected. Their orders are supplemented with computer forecasts to form the production schedule. It is then sent to manufacturing in order to schedule the quantities of references to be produced the following week, with a daily adjustment.

But problems degrade the service rate:

The milk collected includes different quality grades, which makes it necessary to differentiate them in order to best enhance the finished products.
The company is experiencing a saturation of certain means of production, which forces it to daily arbitration on certain products
Difficulties recruiting and training new hires
The cyclical shortage of packaging materials and ingredients.

The group has therefore decided to call on interim management firms to remedy these dysfunctions over a short period of time and without having to recruit on a long-term basis.

Alain Borschneck, the Transition Manager chosen for this mission, has created an operational group to study the causes of these malfunctions and put in place the necessary actions to:

Refine forecasts
Match loads and capacities at the macro level
Issue milk needs over a time horizon to react
Have correct inventory.

Knowing also that the situation is different per site: erroneous quantities available in stock for one, an order taking problem for the other, and saturation of the production lines and a lack of raw materials for the third.

The implementation of a planning / forecasting service has resulted in:

Retain the current relationship between trade and manufacturing, while shifting planning to Supply Chain (which bears responsibility for inventory levels)
Prepare the Supply Chain, essentially focused on downstream logistics, to manage this upstream logistics
Recruit a Planner Appoint a referent (member of the CODIR), to ensure the grafting of the planning within the Supply Chain
Set up a 13-week monthly review of customer needs to compare them to reality: orders versus forecasts, fulfillment versus commitment, ability to define actions to be taken and milk resources.
Set up IT tools for business support (WMS, ERP, MES functionalities, supported by more or less integrated modules)

Thus, the management of the production and delivery of products to the various customers of the company has become more refined and better scheduled according to the different qualities of milk and the needs of the customers, thanks to this 6-month transition mission.