With 4 production sites, 60 Million euros annual revenue in 2016, 170 employees and 25 tons processed polyethylene every year, ELYDAN positions itself as a major European actor in its sector.
The challenges
ELYDAN is subject to a strong seasonality, due to its activity sector and increasingly longer manufacturing times (minimum 15h). It requires therefore 3 weeks minimum to replenish an inventory which doesn’t meet customer expectations, in fact 80% deliveries in ELYDAN are to be delivered under 5 days. In this situation, it is important for ELYDAN to have a strong and effective planning process.
Before implementing Colibri, Excel was the tool used to make sales forecasting and its limits blocked the complete realization of the S&OP process implementation.
In fact, it was difficult to do forecasting simulations during the S&OP meetings. Due to the complexity of the tool, less engaged salespersons did their own forecasting and had their own data.
Other more numeric issues have also urged ELYDAN to abandon Excel and to look for a solution in the market:
– Lower the rupture rate
– Reduce the safety stock
– Limit the manufacturing breakdowns with the emergency team implementation to replenish the inventory
– Reduce the transportation costs by restricting the remainders
In face of these issues Cyrille Antoine, ELYDAN Supply Chain and Operations Director has decided to look for a sales forecasting tool. “The forecasting enables us to anticipate production and maintenance needs and therefore reduce the transportation cost, it became necessary for us to turn to a specific tool in order to improve our service level and working capital” he says.
The new forecasting tool should hence allow to:
– Do simulations in more accurate real time per family, customer and products
– Simulate the impact of the load/ capacity during S&OP arbitration meetings
– Synthesize information in one single common base
– Meet the strong need of collaboration between different services
The first feedbacks on the solution
ELYDAN has calculated the ROI of Colibri on 3 months. Besides the certainly calculated saving time, the indicators of reliability and inventory are also improved.
– Time saving: from more than 10 days before to one single person in charge, 3 days per month, to retrieve and adjust the forecasting
– Forecasting reliability rate per salesperson/ sector/ object increases from 65 to 92%
– Safety stock rate decreases from 1.2 to 0.9. I can be translated as a monthly gain of 200k€ inventory immobilization.
– Inventory availability rate increases from 72% to 84%, or even 95% for the class A products
“Not everything is attributable to Colibri, but this tool helps us build our S&OP process. We needed a forecasting tool because planning under Excel became very complicated.
The strengths of Colibri according to ELYDAN:
– The simplicity and ergonomics to the tool
– The collaboration
– The easy built curves and simulations
– The cost
“ The tool has been deployed for 8 months and has brought us a lot more than we expected, we would like now to go further by perfecting the link between Colibri and our MRP and to use Colibri to do simulations in terms of turnover and not of quantity by adding a cost of goods sold to each product” Cyrille Antoine concludes.
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