Eveready Industries : UniBiz Planning & Forecasting

With product range diversifying, inefficiencies have built up at various

parts of the supply chain. Eveready's supply chain had to match the requirements

of the changing business scenarios. For this they made a transition from the

traditional 'direct to warehouse' model to the 'hub and spoke model.' This

required setting up of 6 mother warehouses across India as a layer between the

child warehouses, manufacturing units and sourcing locations. A system was

required to help the planning and execution process for distribution planning,

production planning and material procurement.

Previously, sales forecast's were totally based on the market scenario perceived

by each individual sales force personnel, which implied a considerable gap

between anticipated demand and actual sales. The Oracle Demantra tool, was

implemented for demand forecasting. Also, Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning

(ASCP) was implemented toautomate the entire supply chain planning and

execution. Thereafter, structured analysis was being done with the help of the

Demantra real time Sales and Operations Planning module to track KPIs with

respect to multiple variables. They have reported the forecast error to be

showing a downward trend and the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) indicator

also pointing towards that.

By March 2011, they are expecting a reduction in pipeline inventory by at least

5% and a forecast accuracy of nearly 85%.