Founded in the Netherlands in 1999, the Refresco Group is specialized in manufacturing and packaging of fruit juice and soft drink for mass distribution (Distributors Brands) and leading industrial groups. The company has 18 production sites around Europe. Based in the Drôme, at Saint Donat/l’Herbasse, Refresco France is the grouping of two entities: “Délifruits” specialized in production of iced tea, fruit juice and flavoured mineral water (200 millions bottles produced every year), and “Nuits Saint Georges Production”. With a turnover of 150 millions Euros and more than 370 employees, Refresco France displays a two-figure growth for several years.

By joining the Refresco Group in 2002, the production activity of Délifruits takes quickly a European dimension. With an average yearly growth of 20% during the 8 last years, the fruit juice and soft drink specialist, concerned with guaranteeing a high service level and a strong innovation policy, decided in 2006 to reorganize its Supply Chain.

“In a logic of external growth, it’s essential to be able to answer, both delays and capacity, to the needs of a larger and more demanding customer base, whether distributors brands or famous industrial brands, confides Olivier Pirouley, Industrial Logistic Manager of Refresco France.

Today, our industrial tool offers a big flexibility in terms of shapes and volumes of PET bottles (Recyclable Transparent Plastic). Nevertheless, in a concern for reactivity and proximity with our customers, mass distribution suppliers, it is necessary to guarantee the right stock at the right place. That means particularly sales forecast optimization, to be able to plan our capacities better and to size them in the optimum way at the production level”, adds Olivier Pirouley.

For Refresco France, the research of a new tool goes so with a process revision. “Indeed, we wanted to move the forecast closer to our customers. In permanent contact with the market and the different buyers, the customer service will provide the entry data on the sales forecast level”, he clarifies. “Equipped with an Excel piloting tool strongly limited in its evolution capacities, our will was to equip ourselves with a performing and intuitive Supply Chain Planning software, to have a data base common to planning and forecasting: that was for us the possibility to adopt a dimension of multi-sites planning, to enjoy better analyses and consequently to take better decisions.”

During the [invitation to tender] launched by Refresco France at the end of 2006, 7 editors were consulted. DynaSys is chosen in April 2007 for its solutions n.SKEP Demand Planning (forecasted demand piloting), including the detailed promotions management, and n.SKEP Production Planning (Master Production Schedule).

“We were confronted to two major problems: forecasting and planning, without forgetting stocks management, continues Olivier Pirouley. The RFI that we’ve established, described precisely the functionalities that we were looking for, and included a bar of notation allowing each editor to evaluate its capacity to answer the expressed requirements. DynaSys has not only perfectly and very professionally answered the RFI, but was also able to demonstrate in a very short delay its capacity to answer our specific business problems.”

And to underline: “We also had the chance to share the experience of Cémoi, another DynaSys customer, whom proximity with mass distribution and the strong seasonality were for us major criterion in the tool choice. This choice made, the deployment of the n.SKEP solutions has been welcomed by the Refresco France team: it’s a little revolution for us!”

“Today, through the different customers that we’ve been accompanying for years, DynaSys has a real business expertise in bottling”, concludes Arnaud Gauthier, Account Manager of DynaSys. “Moët & Chandon, Ruinart, Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin, Krug, Hennessy (LVMH Group), Nestlé Waters Europe, Sanpellegrino, Coca Cola… as many prestigious companies of beverage sector that have trust in our capacity and our will to answer their very specific problems, and to transfer our competencies on the collaborative solution base n.SKEP.”