Demand & Supply Planning, return on the Colibri roundtable

Amplitude and Europrotection shared their experiences

Stéphane Dufaure De Citres, CIO at Amplitude et Richard Crnjanski, Supply Chain director for Euro Protection, share their experience on the implementation of Colibri VISION, a demand planning tool.

For Euro Protection, European leader of personal protective equipment present in more than 12 countries for more than 30 years, forecasts are key to manage many seasonal products while facing long production and replenishment time. The team was using excel before choosing Colibri, they had trouble communicating and were overwhelmed under too many different excel files.

Amplitude Ortho, major international actor in the surgical technology market for lower-limb orthopedics, already had a demand planning tool integrated with their ERP, but they needed a new tool to improve their demand planning process. To realize the main objective (stocks reduction while improving the service rate) an improvement of the make to stock process was necessary.

Ergonomy, ease of use, cost… Th criteria that made the difference

These two companies based their choice on several criteria:

The simplicity and ergonomy of the solution, the costs, affordable for SMEs, the possibility to calculate forecasts using “best fit auto” mode, the absence of black box effect, the possibility to switch from one level to another… All those criteria improve the ease of uses and collaboration between different actors.

For Amplitude and Europrotection, the speed of implementation was a big plus, the project lasted 3 months. “The colibri team were highly reactive and capable to set up the solution in 3 months only” explains Stephane, that also enjoyed working with a dynamic but still human sized actor. “The Colibri collaborative approach will allow us to eadily include and valorize all the partners of the process including our new and independent travelers collaborators” he concludes.

Some first results highly encouraging

Regarding the results they are really good, either for Euro Protection or Amplitude.

Richard Crnjanski explained that since the implementation of Colibri, the forecasts process is going well, hierarchy defined during the project are clear and consensus meeting now happen every month and smoothly.

For Amplitude, Colibri allowed to improve the efficiency of the S&OP process in terms of time and forecasts reliability.