Joey Pietrek 0:00:02.3:
Hello, everybody. My name is Joey Pietrek. I'm a supply chain systems analyst or architect with DLF, and today I'm going to talk to you about how Anaplan is powering our supply chain planning. I suppose I need a clicker. Here we go. So, all right. Who is DLF? Well, why don't we start out by getting this a little interactive in the afternoon here, after we've eaten a little bit. Want to move around. Could you raise your hand if you've ever played a game of golf? Raise your hand. Quite a few people. Okay, well, maybe I don't need any more questions. How about kicked football on a football pitch? All right. Strolled through a park. Had a picnic. Great, great. All of you have come into contact with the product that DLF sells. We are a grass seed company. We enrich land, life and people through seed and science. So we're one of the largest grass seed companies in the world, headquartered out of Copenhagen, Denmark, and we have strategic business units in four different continents. That's actually a picture of Superbowl LX, which was played at Levi's Stadium in San Francisco, and they were using our grass seed for that field. So that is a little bit about DLF, and I'll explain a lot more about DLF in the coming slides, but the question now is, who am I?
Joey Pietrek 0:01:30.1:
So I'm an IT professional with 12 years of experience implementing systems technology and advanced planning in supply chain. So my background actually was primarily supply chain planning, supply chain management up until about three and a half, four years ago when we started the Anaplan project. I've now transitioned into more of an IT kind of product owner role with Anaplan. So it's a little bit of a different transition, but my background is very supply chain-heavy. So a little bit about my personal life. I love starting companies. Most of them don't succeed, but there's a few that I do like to do in my free time, and Drommeliga is actually one that I started with some friends out in Copenhagen. It's a sports fantasy app, so if you get the chance, check it out. Just a little plug. You could probably tell by my accent, or lack thereof, that I'm from the US, born and raised in the Driftless region of western Wisconsin. I lived in Denmark the last several years working on the project, but I just recently moved to the West Coast around Portland, Oregon. That's actually where our big supply base is in North America for grass seeds. About 80 per cent or so of the world's grass seeds are grown in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.
Joey Pietrek 0:02:53.5:
So that's a picture of Mount Hood, the big mountain range that's not too far from there, and then I got a picture of a nice buck over there on the right. That's where I'm from. Western Wisconsin is some of the best whitetail deer hunting in the world, and I grew up hunting and fishing. I was just kind of a country boy growing up. So, so three things that I'd like you to take away from this session today after I'm speaking. So three big things you'll see throughout the discussion. Supply and demand balance. This is extremely critical for us at DLF Seeds, and I'll go into this a little bit more but the problems can really compound themselves year over year if we're not right on getting this balance correct. Second point. This tool, Anaplan, is going to change your way of working. You're going to go from a reactive company to a more proactive company, if done right, and you're going to be able to collaborate with your colleagues in other departments much better. Third, it's a team effort. The quality of what you get out of Anaplan is directly related to what you get in, and you need really good folks to help you along the way that can really contribute to the project.
Joey Pietrek 0:04:12.8:
All right, so talking more about DLF and our supply chain. So probably not a lot of people have dealt too much with a grass seed company and how the supply chain works, so I thought I'd give a little rundown of, of how we do it. So first, seed is sown with growers, so they basically plant the seeds that we have bred. So we have an R&D team. It usually takes around ten years before a variety is bred and passed the testing and basically comes through as a seed that we're going to bring to market, and then once we get enough of that seed to actually plant and produce volumes, we give it to farmers to go out and plant. Usually these are on three-to-five year contracts, so when they plant this seed, every single year we have to take all of that volume that's coming off the crop, no matter what. So it's very weather-dependent here on the initial start of our supply. So then every summer, once it's really warm and the seed's ready to harvest, farmers are going to be out in their combines and they're going to harvest the seed, and then they're going to store that seed in their silos in what we call as uncleaned - a lot of chaff, a lot of extra stuff that was on the field - but it just sits in their silos.
Joey Pietrek 0:05:31.3:
Then, once one of our plants is ready to take in the seed to clean it, they're going to call in the growers, and the growers are going to come and take it to the facility, empty it out. An elevator is going to lift this up to a very, very big machine that's going to gravity feed the seed down, a bunch of shakers - think of a big machine shaking the whole way to clean the seed - and out comes the clean seed product. Then, once the seed is cleaned, it is stored in boxes, and that's what we would call our semi-finished state. So it's basically stored up in boxes in our warehouses until the order comes through and we can package it in its final finished good. So once the order comes in, we've either got to mix the seed or we package it as straight. So if we're packaging it as straight, most likely it is going to then get sold further on to another seed company that will then mix it and package it in their final finished good. So if you go to any store right now, buy a bag of grass seed, you cut it up, you look at it, it all just looks like seed, right? Really, there's probably at least five different species of seed that is in that bag, and the reasoning for that is a lot to do with science and things that that I really can't talk about right now. There is a formulation. There's a reasoning why they do it that way, and so there is this other process of blending all these seeds together that needs to happen before it gets in that bag. Then finally, seed is shipped to customers or to our downstream distribution companies within DLF.
Joey Pietrek 0:07:13.2:
All right. So that's a little bit about the supply chain, what we're working with. Usually from harvest, or from the time that we start cleaning the seed to the time we can ship it and sell it, is about a six-week process. We also have to test this seed, so we're waiting on things. There's other variables, but about a six-week process in there. So it's really important for us actually to make sure that we have enough semi-finished goods available and don't have to call in the cleaning for when the orders come in. So, oversupply. A compounding issue. So talking about the impact of an unbalanced supply chain. Longer-term grower contracts, these three-to-five year contracts really doesn't give us much flexibility. If we're off on forecasting next year, or the year after that, or even three or four years, it's going to be an issue for us that we can't quickly correct. So small annual mismatches compound. Excess commitments build inventory. Shortages force us to spot buy, if we're lucky, but most of the time it's just a missed sale because a lot of these varieties are our patented varieties, and other growers are not going to be able to grow it. So if we don't have the seed available, a lot of the times it's a lost sale.
Joey Pietrek 0:08:34.9:
So the effects of this includes inflated carrying costs, reduced service levels, and also strained grower relationships with our growers. One of the last things we would want to do is try to convince a grower to tear up their field and plant something else. That really is not in our best interest to do that with our relationship with the growers. So what was needed to solve the problem? How could DLF get better at balancing supply and demand? Well, first we realized that this was a global issue. So the problem that we were looking at was in our European business unit, but we realized that this same problem was just as big in our Oceania business, North, South America. So we needed a product that we could use in all of our regions to help out. So, IT ownership. So we are structured a little bit differently. We are centralized in our IT department, but we're decentralized in our supply chain operations. So it really made sense, when we looked at a project like this that was going to be used globally, that the IT department would actually own the product itself. So then IT and the business came together to find a solution. We had a very extensive vendor selection process, and through a lot of demos with a lot of different companies, it was clear that Anaplan was the solution that we should go through going forward.
Joey Pietrek 0:10:07.3:
So what exactly were we trying to solve with Anaplan? So I'll get a little bit more into the specifics and show some examples of what we did in Anaplan to bring this to life. So first off, sales forecast and input consolidation was really difficult. So we were spending way too much time trying to data-mine and organize Excel files, and then it was extremely time-consuming to bring in all those files, consolidate, and it was really error-prone to try to do this and taking a lot of time. So this was really hard to do in Excel, in other words. We were having a lot of issues with getting our demand plan right. Calculating total cleaning needs by variety and month was next to impossible. So trying to convert a finished good to a semi-finished good, and then back in time to a time where we would actually need to call the growers, get the seed in and trying to figure this all out in the future was really difficult. We tried to do it in Excel, but this was something that was just way too many calculations and way too complex to do. Then, routing future demand to machines automatically was a pipe dream. So once we did understand our demand, how much we needed to produce, to figure out what machines were actually going to produce this using logics to try to bring what a real life scenario is going to be in the future, and then capacity model our different packaging machines.
Joey Pietrek 0:11:37.4:
We are a spring company, so our demand line looks like that right around this time, March, April, May, and then kind of like this. So we have to understand how we can thin that demand, and how we can utilize all of our machines to get the orders through accurately. This was just way, way, way too hard to be doing that in Excel. All right. So for the first point, sales forecast input and consolidation was difficult. So we were able to bring all the relevant datasets into one view in a way that had not been attainable in the past. We were also really worried about our salespeople who were going to be forecasting. We thought we might be overloading them with too much data, too many views, but we were able to do this in a really clean, functional way in Anaplan that we really like. Actually, today, now our sales team is asking us for more data. 'Bring in more line items. Bring in more things to help them forecast,' and it's become more part of their daily work, is updating their forecasts as they get more intel. So, check there. Calculating total cleaning needs by variety and month was next to impossible. So this looks really simple right now, what's going on here, and this does look simple for an end user to just figure out, 'Hey, how much seed do I need to clean? How many tons do I need to clean of each variety, each species, each location?'
Joey Pietrek 0:13:08.5:
There are so many complex calculations going on in the back end that's all neatly organized for us to review and calculate, and when I was talking about the people and how important people are in this project, the amount of time we had to spend tinkering with the calculations and the logics - there's people laughing that were part of this, I know - it is a lot, but this is how you bring this forward in a way that makes it easier for end users. You've got to do the work to make sure the back end is set up correctly. So, check there. We were able to figure that out. Routing future demand to machines to see capacity load was impossible. So we started out with pretty intuitive dashboards that allowed an end user to select different settings on the machines, so nothing too difficult here, but just setting the logic, so to speak, of each machine. Then that information is utilized with a lot of complex calculations that are done in the back end to basically allocate this production demand to the correct machines. Then we were able to also build a really nice interface to allow a planner to move production to different machines based on capacity levels and the time of year. So that was really important for us, and I think we've got a pretty nice product right now that we're using.
Joey Pietrek 0:14:34.4:
Then finally, you want to be able to consolidate these plans and get a good overview. So we have a nice dashboard for each plant manager, can easily drill down on their plant, see every machine, see whether they're over or under capacity on a month. Put in some notes as to what they were going to do to try to fix it, and then hand in their supply plan to the supply planner for the monthly supply meeting. So in conclusion, supply/demand balance is better. It's much better now. Going forward, we have a way better idea of what our supply and demand is going to look like in future months and future years. Anaplan has changed our way of working. So we went from a reactive company, a lot of fire drills during the spring, a lot of just not even realizing that we had such an overload of capacity during the spring, to a proactive company trying to solve these problems month and months in advance, and trying to solve over- or under-supply issue years in advance.
Joey Pietrek 0:15:44.4:
Then it's a team effort. So I'm going to embarrass my team a little bit here, but they're sitting in the front right here. So if you get a chance to meet them, they work with Anaplan, and I really want to highlight [?Christina Hoegh-Fabricius 0:15:59.3], sitting right here. She was a demand planner and also our first model builder in the European region, and we're actually up for an award for our demand model, and Christina deserves a lot of the credit. So I just want to say thank you to everyone, and that's it. Now we got some time for some Q&A's. These are just different pictures. We spent so much time whiteboarding things. If you want to get a good product out of Anaplan you've got to put in the work up front, and we spent a lot of time doing that. We had some nice meals though too along the way, so nothing wrong with that. All right. So does anybody have any questions on the presentation? Oh, okay. Tough crowd. David.
Audience 0:17:01.4:
The changed ways of working, could you maybe share a little bit how people react to that?
Joey Pietrek 0:17:08.1:
Yes. Of course, change management is always hard at first, but we were in a situation where we had some major supply challenges. First, COVID. The grass seed industry just exploded during COVID. Everyone was at home working from home, looking at their grasses, looking at their lawns and saying, 'Okay, well I should probably put some more grass seed on that lawn. It's looking a little rough,' and so we had this huge explosion of sales that we hadn't anticipated in the past, and then all the other supply disruptions that happened during COVID. So part of the Anaplan project, one of the main reasons why we started the Anaplan project, was because we didn't have enough seed to actually sell, and we couldn't figure that out fast enough and quick enough to supply it. Then, once we started going in the project, the exact opposite happened. So it was a bit of a whiplash effect. Everyone was seeding their lawns for a couple of years, way more than they had been, so then the next couple of years, they didn't need to seed their lawns as much. We weren't able to quickly enough identify that that demand was going to lower, and so we ended up with excess seed, which up until recently we were still dealing with. It was a three-year compounding issue that we had to go through, so it really brought to attention how important this was. So we actually had a lot of people on board ready to make the change, ready to do things better, so that really helped us in that regard. Come on. There's got to be another question. Yes, Jenny.
Audience 0:18:53.2:
I've heard that you've been doing this region by region, right?
Joey Pietrek 0:19:00.1:
Yes, that's a good question. So we started in Europe, and that was our most mature region, and we were right on time, pretty much, with what we had set out to do, implementing. Then we went to our next region - our next-most mature region - which was our Oceania region, which is Australia and New Zealand. So we're a very spread-out company. We're about 2000 employees, but we're in so many countries. So it was really hard to try to then take the same model that we made… So we have one development model. We have a hub-and-spoke-type model, so we have one development model and then it's spoking out to different supply and demand models for each region. It was incredibly difficult to take this development model that we made for the European market and just copy that to the Oceania market. Our assumptions were that it was going to be much easier to do that and then to go to the next market, but we had a lot of differences in our ERP system, how that was being used, and we needed a lot more time to implement that. So that was much harder, took longer. Then now, fast-forward to today, we're just starting our implementation in our North American region, and that was for other reasons. The business was just simply not ready for it. We didn't have the people in place, the demand planner, supply planner, any planning department really at all.
Joey Pietrek 0:20:26.8:
So yes, there were quite a few unique things with this project. It's really hard to just summarise in 20 minutes, but maybe, drinks later, we can talk a little bit more about it.
Audience 0:20:38.7:
Is that the whole project through?
Joey Pietrek 0:20:41.0:
Yes, these were a lot of the people. There were a lot more people involved on the project, but this was just when I remembered to take a picture at different times, basically. It's a lot of whiteboarding, a lot of trying to figure out. We didn't really have anything digitalized for our planning other than really Excel files, ad hoc Excel files, so we had to build it from the ground up. It took a lot of time in meeting rooms discussing and going through how to do this, and then once we had the first iteration, how do we change this to make it more like what we're going to actually need? Yes?
Audience 0:21:26.3
Can you talk a little bit about the process of your company getting into that position to take on such an initiative, because I'm assuming it's an investment, monetarily speaking and the resources. So the process in being an Excel-based company… I mean, I would assume. I don't know the maturity within the board of directors, maybe your whole team when they do that. How do you, how do you motivate them when you…
Joey Pietrek 0:21:56.5:
Unfortunately, the guy who put it all together in our IT department is no longer with the company today. It was a lot of politicking, I guess you could say. It's really hard sometimes to make the use case for IT projects and projects like this. It's really easy to make the use case for a new sale, when you say, 'Okay, we spend this much, we're going to get this much in.' So this is really hard to do, but the Anaplan folks have been really supportive. We actually had to resubmit for our North American business to get approval to go in, basically because of the people aspects of it there, and the Anaplan folks were really great helping get some different material to show use cases that had been to show value.
Audience 0:22:47.7
From an IT perspective, it was IT that, it wasn't finance or supply chain, it was IT that was the driving factor, would you say?
Joey Pietrek 0:22:57.1:
Business too. I think the business started trying to do an S&OP process and trying to make it formalized, all in Excel, and it just realized really quickly that it's just not possible. Then the other point I wanted to make out too is that you got to make sure you have a really good implementation partner. So [?Philip Erkinger 0:23:23.8] is in the crowd over here with Bedford. I'm going to embarrass him too. Sorry. One of the main reasons, while we were doing the demos and while we were deciding which tool to pick was, we really felt that Philip understood our business really well, and we knew working with him was going to go great. The people aspect of the IT tools is so big. All right.
Unknown Speaker 0:23:53.2:
All right. Any other questions for Joey?
Unknown Speaker: 0:23:56.4:
Let's close up and we can have the words for the next slide.
Unknown Speaker 0:23:58.4:
All right. Awesome. Thank you, Joey. Thank you so much.
Joey Pietrek 0:24:00.0:
Thank you, thank you. Appreciate it.