The firm said that thanks to the use of the software its plant has been able to move from weekly production planning with mixed scheduling quality, to daily planning and high-quality scheduling, improving throughput and customer service while reducing waste and maximizing shelf life quality.
Group Danone is one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, with 88,000 employees and worldwide sales of over $18.5bn in 2006. Around 56% of its revenue comes from its fresh dairy product division, which has more than 40 plants worldwide. The division grew over 9% in 2006, but experienced growth exceeding 20% in many major emerging markets, including Mexico, Argentina, Russia and Turkey.
The planning and scheduling functions for Danone’s fresh dairy production were historically addressed using a combination of home-grown and packaged applications, but these systems could not properly manage the complexity of the fresh dairy business, Danone said.
The right amount of each product used in manufacturing has to be scheduled, and it has to be used within strict time windows. Cleaning rules must also be enforced while minimizing down-time.
Another requirement was for any new packaged application to integrate with its existing SAP systems. Adopting Ilog Plant PowerOps enabled it to move from its home-grown, loosely-coupled scheduling system – which it says took two days to generate an imperfectly optimized plan – to a system that generates high-quality schedules in under 15 minutes.
We have been extremely happy to see that Ilog’s application generates plans that improve every single one of our key performance indicators, said Jean-Michel Egu, director business solutions at Danone. Within Danone, the news is spreading quickly. We already have more requests for implementation in the next two years than we can satisfy. We are currently implementing the solution in Russia, with Argentina next in line.
Ilog said it has around 1,000 commercial customers worldwide using its supply chain planning and scheduling software, while it is in use in research programs at over 1,000 universities around the world.
