MAPA SPONTEX

The Challenge:

STANDARDIZING AND ENHANCING SUPPLY CHAIN PLANNING GLOBALLY

MAPA SPONTEX began a detailed review of its supply chain with the objective of becoming more collaborative, efficient, reliable and structured. The key driver for this was the demand of a market where competition was becoming increasingly keen.

“Despite the deployment of a common ERP system in Europe, we still had to overcome major supply chain challenges. These resulted from an increasing number of constraints, multiple optimization algorithms and growing inter-site cooperation,” explains Richard Crnjanski, Director, Supply Chain Europe. “This meant deploying a planning solution that would naturally involve analyzing our organization and processes.”

From this analysis MAPA SPONTEX identified a number of critical factors related to their supply chain:

• Increasing customer demands (availability factor, lead times, minimum orders, logistics, etc.)
• Bulky low cost products often specific to a given country
• Essential cross flows (75% of the products are not produced in the country where they are sold)
• Increasing share of production coming from Asia meaning longer lead times
• Large local/specific inventories
• Small commercial and production entities

As a result of the review a cross functional project team was set up, including team members from the supply chain and IT teams. The geographical scope of the project was defined, covering five distribution centers in Europe and five production facilities (France, Spain, Hungary and two in Malaysia).

The functional scope included:

• Demand planning, from sales forecast to product lifecycle management, including promotion management
• Calculation of requirements, inventory and deployment policy
• Production planning: Optimization and monitoring of the Sales and Operations Plan (S&OP)

This process, associated with the S&OP approach being deployed for each product line in the company, aims to reconcile the medium-term sales plan with MAPA SPONTEX’s production capability.

The company considers the collaborative process to be a priority. “A common sales forecasting process for all of Europe is essential,” explains Crnjanski. “It is a way for us to obtain single-source, reliable and validated data, whatever the site or product. This allows our managers to refine their control and set business goals accordingly. Centralizing our calculations to better manage procurement and inventory is also a prerequisite.”

The supply chain has to become a “solution finder” for all the departments at MAPA SPONTEX.

The Solution:

COMPLIANCE WITH SPECIFICATION, USER-FRIENDLINESS, FLEXIBILITY AND SCALABILITY

Market research was conducted for a year with the assistance of an external consultant. MAPA SPONTEX left nothing to chance, thoroughly investigating the technology, business knowledge and industry expertise of each provider, followed by visits to their existing customers.

The company opted to deploy QAD DSCP: Demand Planning, Distribution Planning and Production Planning.

“QAD DSCP was the only supply chain solution provider able to present a complete project that had been implemented by other companies,” confirms Crnjanski. “In addition, their team was ready to invest its time and effort with us and demonstrated by accompanying us throughout the process of selection, their professional expertise and seamless knowledge of our industry sector  –  a huge advantage for us.”

The key areas of QAD DSCP which resulted in MAPA SPONTEX selecting the solution were:

• The user-friendliness and ease of use
• Simple integration into the MAPA SPONTEX ERP software (Minos)
• Extensive capabilities for finite capacity planning and detailed promotion management
• The ability to develop multiple ‘what if’ scenarios
• Advanced collaborative technology (Single Click Collaboration®)
• Rapid implementation timescales
• Cost effective licensing

Explains Crnjanski, “QAD DSCP offered a business solution, proven in the market and in our industry. It conforms to our expectations, there were no gray areas, whether it concerned performance or implementation.”

The primary goal of MAPA SPONTEX in improving visibility and control of its supply chain at the global level became a reality.

The Benefits:

GAINS IN TERMS OF FIGURES AND RESULTS

“It is always difficult to establish a reliable return on investment and for us, that’s not the most important thing,” explains Crnjanski. “Structuring our process and ensuring the reliability of our data is already a noteworthy return on our investment. It is the basis required to set up an S&OP process.”

Significant gains included:

• More reliable sales forecasts: +15 points for Retail and +38 points for the Professional market
• A service level increase of 4 points up for professional products and stable in the other sector
• Inventory levels reduced by 17% in value and 30% in coverage/days

In addition to these benefits, the company’s supply chain teams enjoyed greater flexibility in their everyday work. MAPA SPONTEX has also benefited from better inventory visibility, user specific dashboards and a single common database. Inter-site inventory planning has also improved; a single view in QAD DSCP enables the company to control all the flows.

To make all this possible, MAPA SPONTEX developed a true change management policy including not only the supply chain department, but also IT management and sales and marketing services.

Further changes included:

• Move from a monthly bucket to a weekly bucket
• Implementation of a frozen period for the Production Plan (between two and four weeks)
• Centralization of procurement management
• Establishment of inventory control for a common sales forecast process at the European level

“None of this would have been possible without rigorous management of our demand planning, distribution planning and production planning processes through QAD DSCP. These are truly collaborative solutions,” confirms Crnjanski.

Further refinement of the S&OP process will be one of the priorities at MAPA SPONTEX. Integrating the Malaysian factories into the central production plan is also now underway. “First we have to integrate them into the ERP solution and then into the supply chain,” indicates Crnjanski.

Finally, there is another major task: Deployment of the supply chain solution across Central Europe. “We expect our teams to get their skills up and running,” he continues. “Today, our existing QAD DSCP users are already a valuable source of knowledge regarding the continuous improvement of our tools. Equally the research and development department at QAD is very responsive to our requests for additional functionality.”

*QAD Digital Supply Chain Planning (DSCP) was formerly known as QAD DynaSys