Iwan de Leeuw 0:00:03.1:

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure being here and to tell you something about our business, our products and the way Anaplan helped us to solve some challenges we have in planning. My name's Iwan de Leeuw. I've been working for Bouter for almost five years, and before that, 20 years of experience in different industries, not steel, but the aluminum industry, again, manufacturing and fashion retail, so it's logical to end up in cheese. I have a small video regarding our business, so I'll show you in a bit. That will be the introduction into A-ware and Bouter. Bouter is a division of A-ware, and A-ware is, after FrieslandCampina, the biggest dairy company in the Netherlands. I'll tell you something about the planning challenge we had, and that it's related to our cheese product, the planning landscape before the introduction of Anaplan, why we choose Anaplan and what we have done and what we will do in the future. 

[Video plays 0:01:15.8]

Iwan de Leeuw 0:03:49.4:

So this is a brief introduction of A-ware, and I think, as you have seen, it manages the whole chain from farm to, at the end, the consumer product. A-ware is a family-owned company with more than 135 years of experience. It's a producer of fresh dairy, so all the kinds of products that you have there, fresh dairy, cream, tapas - you've seen the olives in the movie - milk powder and all kinds of cheeses. The process of cheese starts with the large cheeses and into pieces, slices, cubes, powder or grated. It's an active supply chain partner in agri-food, collaborating with dairy farmers. So the dairy farmers are linked to A-ware. They're working exclusively for A-ware, providing the milk at the end to make cheese out of. So figures of A-ware, we have an annual revenue of €4.5 billion, 70 million kilos of cheese, around 5000 employees worldwide and 1700 farmers working together with us. 

Iwan de Leeuw 0:05:08.3:

Bouter Group is a division of A-ware, and Bouter - I think probably no one knows Bouter, and it may be the best kept secret - that Bouter is working exclusively for Albert Heijn and Delhaize already for 40 years. Before a strategic partnership was known as a business concept, Bouter was a strategic partner for Albert Heijn, and that means that all the cheese products and tapas products you see at Albert Heijn are coming from our factories. Albert Heijn has around 40 per cent market share in the Netherlands, so from all the sandwiches with cheese, 40 per cent of them are served by us. It's quite a competitive market, the retail market, as you are aware, and therefore we are working every day to make sure that the products are in the stores. We deliver with a service level of more than 98 per cent, and that's quite a challenge with the products we have. 

Iwan de Leeuw 0:06:20.5:

What is our planning challenge that we have, and what is typical for the product we have? As I mentioned, cheese matures over time, so in the stores you can buy young cheese, and you can buy old cheese, and that's a natural process. So it takes around 48 weeks until the cheese is an old cheese, and you cannot stop that process. So that's one part of the complexity, and the other part is that Albert Heijn is a frontrunner in sustainability, and they've chosen together with Bouter and A-ware a couple of years ago to make sure that all the cheese is made of milk coming from farmers that are up to certain sustainability levels. That's a beautiful concept, but it makes the planning cycle more difficult because there is a fixed amount of farmers. The cows are supplying certain levels of milk, which can change from time to time, and all the milk has to be processed. As already mentioned earlier today, milk is a fresh product, so you can't keep it for long. So, the only solution for that is any milk that is left, make cheese out of it. So on one hand, we have the amount that is changing from day to day. On the other hand, we have supply changing from day to day, so at certain periods of the year cows are supplying more milk and at other parts of the year they're supplying less milk. Also, the milk price determines whether farmers give the cows more to eat to provide more milk.

Iwan de Leeuw 0:08:15.2:

So it's quite complex, and at the end of the day, everything that is left of the milk comes towards us in the form of cheese, and we have to store it, and we know that we can't store it forever because it matures over time. So that is quite difficult to manage. It is also that the certain raw material you receive on day one is type A, and on day two it's type B, and so it matures over time. We didn't have any good software to help us with that. The only thing we had was Excel, and that's not the best way to plan such a critical process. So what were the challenges we had? On the one hand, the planning process was in Excel. On the other hand, only a few key users knew how this planning process worked, and it was very difficult to explain to management and discuss the different scenarios that there are. So for instance, if we wanted to do a promotion with Albert Heijn, the question do we have sufficient raw materials in that specific age was something that took almost a day, and if we said, okay, if you want to do that promotion a couple of weeks earlier or a couple of weeks later, then the planners had another day of work until they came with a solution.

Iwan de Leeuw 0:10:00.1:

Cheese ripening is only a part of our planning process. So, we have a planning landscape with different kinds of tools. On the one hand, we have SLIM4, which we implemented in 2023 for the demand forecasting. So we have an experience of decades with Albert Heijn. We have a lot of data. We receive all the data from the stores of Albert Heijn, so enough data to provide a proper forecast. So demand forecast we do in SLIM4 from SLIM stock. We use it also for production planning until the raw material planning, but then the raw material planning itself, how do we manage that? That was our challenge we had, and it couldn't be fulfilled with other programs. Why did we come up with Anaplan? As mentioned, it was very difficult to quickly plan different scenarios, and Anaplan showed us that they were capable of scenario planning. Anaplan also was working with our colleagues from another A-ware division on the planning of their raw materials, and there was the need for clear dashboards to have the discussion with management, okay, which decision do we need to make on our sales and our promotions. If we use all the raw materials we have in the younger ages today, what happens then, fulfilling the over-demand in a year's time?

Iwan de Leeuw 0:11:48.3:

We had a couple of planners working day by day on the cheese planning, and they were used to planning line by line, but to get that more efficient, we wanted to plan by exception instead of managing line by line. As mentioned, leverage with the A-ware Group - so further up in the chain, the A-ware colleagues were already working with Anaplan and connecting these together would bring us much further than we are today. So that was the reason we chose Anaplan. What have we done? So phase 1, I haven't mentioned yet, but just three weeks ago, we went live with Anaplan, so we're quite early in our challenge with Anaplan. What have we done? Mapping the current and projected cheese inventory by ripening stage and time. We did first integrate what we did in Excel into Anaplan, but then improved with the needs we had. Event planning and enabled planners to simulate and compare the ripening scenarios. So it's now much easier to say, okay, if we want to go for scenario A or scenario B, it's just a matter of getting the engine running, and the answer is there.

Iwan de Leeuw 0:13:27.9:

To give you a bit of an idea of what that looks like, we had an Excel-driven way of working, which you see here on the left. It's all production weeks. So, cheese is produced at one week, and then it matures over time, and you see all the columns there, but basically, we have certain raw material, and it turns into the different stages of ageing. It's quite complex. Only a few planners understood what was happening there, and it's extremely flexible, but also very easy to make mistakes. If you would explain it to someone, if he sees only lines and columns, it doesn't ring a bell, so there was a need for change. What have we done? This is one part of how we implemented it in Anaplan. So basically, first integrated the Excel into Anaplan, but started here with at least some more essential views, looking also at giving alerts on what is happening there. What I haven't said is that you have the ageing process. The only thing that helps us with ageing is that at a certain stage, the cheese can be stored in cooling and that natural process stops, and you can leave it there for a certain time. So that's also integrated into this. So this was basically step one, just implementing what was in Excel into Anaplan.

Iwan de Leeuw 0:15:20.0:

Here, you see that the second step gives us a view. You see it on top. Are we running out of stock? So that's the first thing that we would like to avoid, but we would also like to avoid if we have too much stock. So we have here different alerts, different dashboards to tell us where we are, and it gives us the flexibility. We have production weeks when the cheese is produced, and at a certain stage, it is being packed, so also to switch from production week to packaging week also helps. It also gives us a view of how the inventory looks over time. So we can have sufficient stock today, but we also need to have sufficient stock for the older ages in 48 weeks. Here you see the different scenario planning, so we can simulate different types of promos at Albert Heijn or Delhaize, and then we can see, okay, scenario one gives this inventory projection, scenario two gives that inventory projection. You can imagine we added those visuals into Excel. Here you see an example of if we go to that scenario, then there's the missing demand, so that really helps us to make the right decisions.

Iwan de Leeuw 0:16:45.4:

Here you see the projection of inventory further over time, and also you see there the different blue bars, the yellow bars. So the blue bars are the cooling inventory, where we really can stage the inventory for a longer time, and the yellow bars are the inventory that is maturing over time. What are the next steps, and how do we want to move forward? As I mentioned, we have only been doing this now for three weeks. We are happy that we are live. We are happy that we have put our Excel aside and are working now in a good system. The next steps are to integrate further in the chain with our colleagues on the milk part, and I think that, well, we've seen a lot of inspiration today. So it's only a small part of our IT landscape that we are now fulfilling with Anaplan, but there are probably many more ideas for the future.