Dairy Crest is the UK’s premier chilled dairy foods company and has over 7 000 employees across 21 sites throughout the UK as well as in Ireland.

To provide real-time control across its new Foods division, Dairy Crest resorted in 2004 to the European leader of SCM solutions, DynaSys. This agreement allows Dairy Crest to extend its use of the Advanced Planning and Scheduling solutions SKEP by DynaSys into its new Foods division, which manufactures leading household brand names throughout UK, including; Clover, Country Life, Golden Churn, St Ivel Gold, Cathedral City, Hartington and Wexford.

While the system went live by the end of July 2005, the integrated windows-based SKEP suite including forecasting, scheduling and planning will provide real-time control for Dairy Crest across the new Foods division. After implementing SKEP Advanced Planning and Forecasting in its pre-packed cheese division, Dairy Crest decided to extend into the Foods division the advanced forecasting and planning capabilities. In fact the SKEP solution had already understood the company’s business requirements and demonstrated how it was best fit to address their unique needs.

David Batts, IT Director at Dairy Crest, said: “We chose SKEP over other products because of its best-of-breed integrated benefits and ease of use. We have clearly noticed the flexibility, power and ease of use of its forecasting, scheduling and planning suite in our Cheese business unit and how it could improve the co-ordination of planning activities and provide us with highly accurate performance in a dynamic ever-changing environment.

SKEP provides us with a robust end-to-end business process from initial forecasting activities right through to finished goods off the line. This gives us confidence that the software will be flexible enough to meet all our requirements today, drive cost efficiencies and management control, and support our future development plans; all backed up by an excellent relationship we have with the French editor as well.”

Augustin Holveck, CEO of DynaSys, concludes: “We are delighted that Dairy Crest is extending their use of SKEP into its new Foods division. Dairy Crest is a highly recognised brand leader in its field and we believe this will be supported by their adoption of SKEP advanced forecasting, planning and scheduling capabilities. To date, we have established a very strong working relationship with Dairy Crest and we look forward to continuing this well into the future.”