Animal nutrition company
Company profile
Our customer is a global company in animal nutrition that has multiple factories and serves various markets with a wide range of products for different applications. The market is evolving rapidly. Their IBP process demands for fact-based decision making based on scenario analysis.
Challenge
The dynamics of the market our customer operates in, ask for scenario thinking, the time windows for decision making preparation are short and limit the possibilities. Typical scenarios include:
- How to supply if demand in a certain market makes a step change
- How to handle the impact of upcoming legislation limiting feasibility of supply sources
- How and where to extend capacity to deal with sales growth
- How to mitigate supply risk (risk resilience)
- Open/close decisions of production lines and plants
Project
We offered a structured approach to building a decision support model:
- Understanding the supply network and planning logic
- Agile modeling to translate a business problem into mathematics
- Model validation and calibration
- Embedding the functionality in a cloud-based application that enables running a pre-defined set of possible scenarios
- Furthermore we offered supporting workshops to model/develop scenarios for strategic open/close decisions.
Results
- Fast and accurate what-if analysis with the help of mathematical models
- Gaining insights by understanding, decomposing problems and understanding the relevant factors
- Agile modeling helps to objectify making trade-offs
- Decision for the future footprint are taken; implementation projects started.