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Global Animal Health

Global animal healthcare company selects Aera Decision Cloud™ to improve forecasting, safety stock levels, and lead times.

A global animal health company delivering quality medicines, vaccines, and diagnostic products, complemented by biodevices, genetic tests, and precision livestock farming. In addition to producing vaccines, anti-infectives, parasiticides, dermatology products, medicated feed additives, animal health diagnostics, and other pharmaceuticals, the company also offers services such as dairy data management, e-learning, and professional consulting.

Business Need

Making the step change from a descriptive to a prescriptive supply chain to improve forecasting, safety stock levels, and lead times.

Results

  • Improved forecast accuracy, especially in international markets
  • 10% forecast stability improvement, resulting in better control on the supply side
  • All C-class SKUs now have statistical forecast only, offering superior coverage
  • A 1-2% reduction in carrying cost due to automation and digitization of the overall process
  • Improved proactive recommendations to address responsible stakeholders for review and update lead time with variations

The Challenges

Although the company has continually endeavored to build and expand its own supply chain capabilities and tried to get all ERP and transactional systems aligned to provide regular improvements in forecast accuracy, it recognized that transformational improvement would require a step change that the existing systems lacked the flexibility or imagination to address.

The company’s forecast suffered from inaccurate safety stock levels and lead time, which required time-intensive, manual efforts to calculate, raising costs, and hurting service levels.

The company wanted to move from descriptive to prescriptive, and ultimately self-driving, finding augmented or automated approaches instead. It also wanted to reduce volatility as its portfolio grew and new businesses and products were integrated and introduced. Further the company also wanted to develop optimal, more responsive safety stock levels, and lead times.

Another challenge caused by its static headcount is its inability to free up time through augmentation to focus on higher value items.

The Solution

Aera Decision Cloud — Aera Touchless Forecasting Skill
Aera Crawlers — SAP ECC and APO, JDBC, and flat files

The animal health leader embarked on the Decision Intelligence journey with Aera to improve forecasting, safety stock levels, and lead time.

With the Aera Touchless Forecasting Skill implemented, the company saw a marked improvement in forecast stability and accuracy. It leveraged Aera’s augmentation to utilize supply chain formulas and Monte Carlo simulations to recommend optimal safety stock.

Further, adopting Decision Intelligence led to superior lead time analysis, and the ability to compare actual shipments to actual lead time with recommendations for adjustment and intervention when needed.

In all cases, the company was the final decision maker whether to accept or reject the recommendations, deciding on changes, and helping the system learn from decisions made.

Moving forward, it plans to automate some of these decisions due to high confidence in Aera Skills.

“Our supply chain users trust what Aera tells them right now and they've got great ideas about how we can leverage Aera to make our lives easier, delivering better results for the company. People work on these improvement projects on top of their day jobs because they believe in it and they can see the long-term benefit.”

-Global Demand Leader of New Product Introduction

Results

Employing Decision Intelligence through Aera Touchless Forecasting Skill, the company enabled accurate demand forecasts, optimal safety stock, and lead time visibility creating time for planners to adopt, collaborate, and innovate.

Further, the improved savings and revenue gained from the new forecast had rapid return of investment, and the augmentation of the safety stock and lead time processes allowed shifting away from labor-intensive, time-consuming number crunching.

Collaborating with Aera, the company achieved its goal of more face time with customers and a more engaged workforce, who are actively seeking the next use cases for Aera within the organization, which aligns to senior leadership’s digital innovation goals.