Warburtons is One Step Ahead of Demand

In the bakery industry, orders from customers are received and confirmed by early afternoon the day before delivery, meaning production has to start before the order is even confirmed. This requires a close relationship between the bakeries and customers in terms of forecasting demand and understanding stock levels.

Warburtons is the second most valuable consumer grocery brand in the U.K., but the company was facing issues in its order fulfillment processes due to certain challenges in its production planning systems.

What was needed was an effective solution to address the need of sub-daily production planning and scheduling, thus optimizing the production plans on a real-time basis.

To address this business need, Wipro Technologies worked closely with SAP AG as a member of the Industry Value Network group for consumer products. Driven heavily by customer participation and SAP's industry knowledge, this network group brings together customers, partners and SAP to co-innovate and quickly develop solutions to solve industry-specific customer challenges. Wipro's collaboration with SAP has been a key to the success of this solution.

Wipro's innovative offering is a demand management solution called the Sub-Daily Production Planning and Scheduling (iSDPS) solution, which aims to provide a consistent and simplified solution for managing the short-term production planning process at Warburtons' bakeries.


Identifying the Problem

Warburtons has been using a traditional ERP-based production planning system. However, it used certain tailored processes for performing the production planning and scheduling operations within a 24-hour manufacturing and delivery cycle. To make things easier to plan in detail, production planners created numerous spreadsheets to manipulate the ERP-sourced production plans at a sub-daily level.

Bakery products being perishable in nature cannot not be produced "made to stock," thereby making production planning and scheduling the key in meeting customer orders on time.   

Due to the dynamic nature of the actual demand, changes had to be made to finished goods process orders in the ERP, and the semi-finished goods orders under production had to be re-planned.     

Limited cross-plant visibility on capacity and material availability positions added inflexibility to the planning process.

Warburtons was looking for a consistent and simplified solution for managing the short-term production planning process at all of its 14 bakeries.


Detailing the Solution

The iSDPS is an application designed to update changes to the production plans with the demand changes that come in during the day of production. The solution leverages SAP's Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture. This orchestrates business processes and delivers the required functionality to the end user more quickly thus accelerating the business value to the customer.

The application is designed to perform three main processes, namely reporting, simulation and processing for helping the planner update the changes easily.


The Expected Benefits

The expected benefits of the demand planning solution being implemented at Warburtons can be grouped into these categories:

1. Service delivery "on time":

• Approximately 15 percent more reaction time available to orders received
• Quicker re-planning of production based on late demand changes

2. The optimized use of production resources:

• Produce only "what is required";  reduces working capital requirement
• Reduction in product scrapped due to out-of-date coding issues
• Better capacity utilization due to improved central and cross-site visibility
• Ability to simulate production runs with near real-time data against material availability, production process and capacity utilization constraints

3. Better labor utilization:

• Eliminate use of local spreadsheets for sub-daily planning
• Saving in central supply chain planning team's effort spent in data consolidation across plants for finish time projection/capacity management in peak demand times

According to Warburtons Bellshill Planning Team Leads Tam Gordon and Jimmy Gordon, "iSDPS-innovative software does planning superbly."