Our client, a major chicken, turkey, and pork processing company in the United States, partnered with Plantensive and Blue Yonder (previously known as JDA Software) on their Demand and Supply Planning solutions. This client harvests more than 500 million chickens a year and has almost 20 plants, 60+ Distribution Centers/Freezers and an additional 40+ Copackers across the United States. This poultry manufacturer was facing many challenges including replacing and enhancing their existing Manugistics Demand and Fulfillment solutions that were running on life support. They also needed to enhance their Demand Planning solution by leveraging Demand 360 for consensus forecasting. In addition, the poultry manufacturer needed to implement a truly constraint-based supply planning solution that respects customer level specific shelf life (fresh and frozen products), capacity constraints, material constraints, and incorporate a vertically integrated solution from east to west coast.
Our Solution:
Plantensive led the implementation of JDA Demand, Demand 360, and ESP across the entire enterprise. Plantensive worked with IT to define interface requirements, data mapping, systems integration testing and user acceptance testing to enable a new planning process that is more responsive and integrated. Plantensive also worked with the organization on end user training and knowledge transfer to ensure a smooth change and understanding in the planning processes. In addition, given the very specific requirements of a major poultry manufacturer, there was a need for date sensitive inventory functionality within the ESP solution, which had never been done before. In order to meet these requirements, Plantensive created a customized solution that would calculate the pounds of harvested birds by the individual piece of meat. This is a critical process as this calculates the raw materials that will be available and the expiration date of these raw materials.
Plantensive also worked with Blue Yonder to implement inheriting and propagating shelf life’s within the bills of material. This functionality would ensure that the correct expiration dates were calculated on each SKU depending on if it inherits it’s shelf life from its raw material or gets a new born on date once that SKU is made. This new functionality makes it so they can respect customer specific minimum shelf life requirements on the 35,000+ customer SKUs, ranging from 5 days to 365 days.
As a result, the minimum shelf life’s and expiration date calculations are now fully accurate for this manufacturer. In return, the poultry manufacturer knows which products need to be sold immediately to meet minimum shelf life. This now eliminates planning errors for our client and ultimately pushes a more reliable and safer product to the consumer which their competition is unable to do.
Our Results:
As a result of our partnership, our client had the first successful large scale deployment of ESP with inheritance of date sensitive inventory in the Poultry industry. The client also improved their forecasting process by leveraging Plantensive’s Demand Core and improved their supply planning solution that now incorporates exception driven supply core process flows. They also integrated JDA with SAP MRP for integrated planning and execution. Finally, a foundational framework was defined for improved processes such as the integration with logistics, feature availability, and order promiser.
