ADM (NEOVIA)

The Challenge:

STRUCTURE, PLAN, INCREASE RELIABILITY

While complete foods — the company’s core business — remain a focal point for ADM, accounting for 35% of the company’s turnover, the pet food and additives sector has continued to expand, leading to a profound change in culture. “We have moved from a predominantly logistics culture in complete food to a global supply chain management culture in an attempt to meet our customers’ expectations in both these areas. This is helping us to advance on all fronts,” explains Pierre Monchal, ADM‘s (NEOVIA) Corporate Supply Chain Director.

“In fact, take mass distribution, for instance, our customers’ requirements are constantly changing; hence, our regular promotions and frequent product changes. In addition, manufacturers who use our additives can also switch quite quickly from one type of product to another, depending on changes in regulations and market expectations. For our part, the production chain for the products we offer is longer than that of our historical markets. Therefore, properly anticipating our customers’ requirements has become strategic so that our entire supply chain — from purchasing through to distribution via the production plants — could be ready to meet those needs.”

“We have, therefore, gradually moved to a genuine culture of anticipating and adapting to the market, calling for improved demand forecasts and better fine-tuned preparation of operations,” explains Monchal.

For “pilot” businesses that embraced this new culture, standard tools, such as Excel, for example, soon showed their limitations. The urgent need for powerful structuring became apparent. An APS (Advanced Planning System) solution was required and ADM opted for QAD DSCP.

The Solution:

ROBUST, AGILE AND IN THE CLOUD

In addition to the broad operating spectrum of the Demand Planning, Distribution Planning and Production Planning solutions, QAD DSCP demonstrates its expertise and ability to support ADM every step of the way.

“Like us, QAD is an innovative, world-class business that listens to its customers and, above all, understands their needs,” adds Monchal. “This is a company that has kept the human touch despite its international remit.”

Final decisions regarding solutions and partners were made after launching an invitation to tender with seven software vendors.

These solutions will be cloud-based. The IT system department adopts a formal approach — outsourcing and hosting must be subcontracted. Secure data, their centralization, management, circulation and reliability — all of this requires an IT and cloud expert — who better than QAD? And they were soon proved right. In fact, when NEOVIA was taken over by ADM and the two animal health entities were merged, there was no tedious and costly switchover between two different settings —- just seamless integration thanks to the cloud-based system.

The project got off the ground by deploying the Demand Planning solution for three pilot entities: Petfood Brazil, Petfood Mexico and Ingredients (global business based in Switzerland). The others will be used later down the line.

The Benefits:

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

“Demand Planning provides us with reliable, common data to share. We have achieved great results in terms of sales forecasts accuracy. In turn, this has led to an improvement in our customer service levels and inventory reduction. These tangible improvements are down to the use of the QAD DSCP as well as the growing maturity of our teams —- both are inextricably linked,” says Monchal. 

“The acquisition by ADM forced us to slow the pace and focus on integration, but our deployment plan is already up and running again in preparation for a pilot for Supply Planning,” explains Monchal. “The buy-in remains strong, regardless of country, even if it calls for a radical change in the way we go about our daily business. And what a transformation!” 

“It will take some time to implement QAD DSCP solutions in all countries, some of which are not as far along the supply chain as others, but also do not always have the same requirements. We nevertheless remain convinced that the cloud-based end-to-end DSCP solutions from QAD are an asset to promote our development and support our S&OP processes,” concludes Monchal.

*QAD Digital Supply Chain Planning (DSCP) was formerly known as QAD DynaSys