Food production and eating habits change constantly, and that’s a challenge for demand planning in the food business. At Virginia Food, one of the Philippines’ leading processed meat manufacturers, accurate demand forecasts help to optimize production and react quickly to market changes and disruption.
“Our demand forecasts used to be based on the sales history,” explains the company’s demand planning manager. “But we’ve learned that timely inputs from sales and marketing are important too. Those teams know things that history can’t tell us.”
The diversity of knowledge within the business also led to multiple silos of data. Supply, demand, and finance all managed their own versions of the plan. “We spent a large chunk of our time aligning these numbers instead of thinking strategically for our business,” the demand planning manager says.
One platform, many opportunities
The demand planning team decided to replace its spreadsheet-based forecasting process and began evaluating solutions. “We ultimately chose Anaplan because it's scalable,” says the demand planning manager. “Beyond demand planning, it could help us with supply planning and financial consolidation as well.”
The demand planning team used Anaplan to build a new demand-planning process that gathers business intelligence from sales and marketing personnel to create a consolidated demand plan. They explain: “We are able to marry the history with what is currently happening in the market, which gives us one source of truth for everyone in the company.”
The team was able to build a comprehensive demand planning process in less than five months. “Despite some challenges with data quality, we were still able to go live on schedule,” says the demand planning manager. “We’re very proud of that achievement."
Extending the planning horizon
Today, every aspect of Virginia Food’s demand planning is data-driven, and the process is much more efficient and far-reaching. “Using Anaplan, we were able to cut our demand planning process from 60 days to 30 days,” says the demand planning manager. “Before, we only had six months out in our forecast, and currently we have two years.”
Extending the planning horizon has positive impacts for Virginia Food’s vendors. “With Anaplan, we can give our suppliers visibility into our plans for the next two years, so they can prepare for our needs,” says the demand planning manager.
Most important of all, the new process has improved the accuracy of the company’s demand forecasts from 80% to 95%, giving decision-makers more clarity and confidence in managing the supply chain.
