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Case Study: Food Sciences Corporation
Customer Industry: Food Products
Number of Employees: 200
Food Sciences Corporation is a leading manufacturer of high quality nutritionally designed food products and dietary supplements. The company produces and distributes a wide variety of healthful snacks, drink mixes, cereal bars, etc.
The Business Problem
There was a strong need for an integrated planning solution for projecting raw material
requirements to support the production plan. This was being achieved earlier using manual,
labor-intensive processes that combined information from various source systems.
Specifically, the following types of information needed to be integrated:
- Bill of Materials data providing the breakdown of a unit of finished product into its constituent parts.
- Estimated demand for finished goods.
- Inventory levels of finished goods, work in progress and raw materials.
- Economic order quantities.
It was important to be able to make adjustments to demand data as necessary and re-calculate the raw material projections on an as-needed basis. Also important was the need to perform "what-if" analysis to model a variety of business scenarios.
The Niteo Solution
Food Sciences Corporation engaged Niteo's technical services to address the above planning requirement. Niteo's subject matter specialist engaged in discussions with the Food Sciences user community to determine the right solution to fulfill the client's needs.
Niteo's solution consisted of the following components:
- A Cognos Enterprise Planning model that accepts data feeds containing the input data and performed all the calculations necessary to arrive at the material projections based on the Bill of Materials, demand, EOQ, inventories, etc.
- An Administration Console developed using the Planning - Manager tool that allows the system administrator to control the application workflow and determine the flow of data within the application.
- An output report which allows the user to print a consolidated statement of material requirements by vendor.
The model was set up to perform a full explosion of the bill of materials from finished goods (FG) to work in progress (WIP) to raw materials (RM). Inventory levels at each level and EOQs were considered to come up with the raw material requirement projection.
The user was provided with screens to view and adjust the demand projections as necessary. The tool was set up to convert diverse quantities into a standard unit of measure (Lbs) for aggregation purposes. Such quantities are then converted back to their original unit of measure for reporting purposes.
Niteo was responsible for designing the overall solution architecture and implementing all components of the Cognos solution. Niteo provided recommendations on what hardware should be used and how these components could be configured optimally for best performance. Security was implemented using Cognos Access Manager.
The solution was initially prototyped in a small proof-of-concept environment. Once the value of the solution was successfully demonstrated, Niteo proceeded to complete the full implementation.
Solution Benefits
The Niteo solution provided Food Sciences Corporation with an integrated mechanism of combining all of the source data together with manual inputs to produce the materials requirement plan.
As a result of the Niteo solution, Food Sciences Corporation was able to reduce the time needed to plan its materials requirements and increase the accuracy of its planning process. The time saved in collecting, calculating and consolidating data can now be more effectively utilized for business analysis to support better decision making.
Contact Niteo
For additional information about Niteo, including case studies, white papers, and other materials that detail how our solutions have worked for other companies and how they can help your organization, please contact us at marketing@niteo.com or 1-800-406-5033.
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