Faccenda and Grampian boost demand forecasting with new IT solution

New demand planning software has helped poultry giant Faccenda and Grampian Country Pork improve the quality of their forecasts and boost service levels to customers.

The software, from supply chain management specialists TXT e-solutions, has helped both companies consolidate demand planning and budgeting across multiple sites into a central system, and aggregate and analyse data by products, channels and time.

Grampian Country Pork group IT manager Bob Janes said: “Our old system had no means of actually calculating a sales forecast and relied on our sales force to manually enter the forecast using historical data.

“The new system generates a sales forecast based on historical data using various algorithms. This is then checked by our sales team on a weekly basis who can override it if they need to. The data is presented in a very friendly user interface, which has the look and feel of a spreadsheet. It also has the ability to predict the impact of promotional activity on associated products.”

“The system feeds into our planning system and our users feel the accuracy of the sales forecast has improved since its implementation, which has helped with our service levels to customers.”

The company’s chicken and red meat divisions have both shown an interest in the software following its successful roll out in the pork business, he added.

Faccenda has also seen significant improvements in the quality of its forecasting since implementing the solution in early spring, said supply chain director Andy Dawkins.

“Until now, our focus has been on improving our forecasting. The next step is to look at linking the system into our production and procurement functions. We need a reliable system that can feed into our resource planning across six sites.”