AGC Glass Europe gains clarity with improved supply chain planning

Not fully integrated technology at AGC Glass Europe couldn’t keep pace with the company’s complex supply chain needs. Moving to Anaplan for sales and operations planning (S&OP) and other processes enabled the company to accelerate scenario analysis, reduce inventory and working capital, and control technology spending with fewer supply chain applications. 

Transparency is key to success in the glass manufacturing business. That’s not just wordplay — like all manufacturers, glass-makers need a clear view of shared objectives and ways to achieve them. At AGC Glass Europe, a leading producer of flat glass with over 100 operating sites, information about sales and operations planning (S&OP) was murky until recently. “The transparency of the data was not there,” recalls François Rase, Head of S&OP at AGC Glass Europe, “so the local planning teams and my central team couldn’t always agree on priorities.”

The company looked for ways to improve transparency while addressing the shortcomings of its S&OP technology — a complex old tool that had become unusable. “The time needed to run the S&OP process was too long, and there was no way to optimize the plan,” Rase recalls.

Modeling the entire supply chain

After running a proof of concept, AGC Glass selected the Anaplan platform for its S&OP processes. “One reason why we chose Anaplan is that it enables us to model our entire supply chain, based on true costs, in an agile manner,” says Ivan Geerts, Supply Chain Director at AGC Glass Europe. “A second reason is that Anaplan is very configurable. We designed it to fully meet the needs of our supply chain planning department.”

With support from Bluecrux, AGC Glass built a mid- to long-term (18-month) S&OP process, with stock and inventory turnover monitoring, on the Anaplan platform. The company also built a model to support strategic investment decisions, and is utilizing digital twin capabilities in Anaplan to support real-time decision-making in the upstream supply chain.

Greater agility and transparency

With its new supply chain planning models, AGC Glass can now evaluate multiple “what-if” scenarios to support data-driven decision-making. “The Anaplan planning engine allows us to quickly run many different scenarios that we can easily compare,” says Geerts. “Before Anaplan, running and comparing different scenarios would take us at least a couple of days, but with Anaplan, we can run many more scenarios just in a couple of hours.” Rase estimates that the team can test 20 scenarios in the same time it used to take to run two or three.

Those capabilities have boosted production efficiency. AGC Glass has driven a 10% reduction in the stock required to run the business with Anaplan, along with a corresponding decrease in working capital. The team has also reduced S&OP overhead by paring back the number of planning tools — and with a single company-wide source of supply chain truth, visibility and trust have improved. “We are much more agile and transparent,” Rase says. “With Anaplan we have removed a layer of planning — we now only have central planning and local planning.”

Geerts agrees, noting that the improvements enabled by Anaplan have rippled throughout the company. “It allows us to achieve our targets — whether it be reductions in working capital, achieving the right service level, as well as achieving the right efficiency levels in the planning department,” he concludes.