VITACUIRE, a family owned company from the Lyon region (France) chose Colibri to modernize and improve its demand process.
Watch the interview of Sebastien Favre, Supply Chain Director. (French interview with English subtitles)
VITACUIRE, is a French SMB, specialized in the production of puff pastry products: appetizers, snacking, and to share. The company is one of the leaders on the market and is making over 25 million euros in revenue with around 150 employees. 20% of its sales are internationals (USA, Canada, Mexico, England, Spain, Benelux…). Its production unit has a capacity of about 10 000 tons.
The sales forecasts, a strategic topic for a SMB in the food & beverage sector
Due to a strong seasonal activity and short delivery time, sales forecasts have always been strategic for VITACUIRE.
Forecasts are made for a 2 years period with a rolling budget for the week. The forecasts are feeding the requirement needs that allow to
- Set production planning
- Extract the needs for semi-finished appetizers
- Launch replenishments for raw products and packaging
- Calculate the needs at a monthly time bucket to update the monthly S&OP meetings during the executive management committee over 13 months rolling.
The limitation of Excel
Until 2016 forecasts were managed on an Access base, then excel files were built to improve the forecasts and manage the process.
But quickly some limitations were raised:
- Slow connection between files
- Manual management complicated and tedious
- Low reliability
- Complex collaboration process
It was decided to choose a simple and collaborative sales forecasting tool in order to compensate the issues raised by using Excel.
The choice of Colibri
Sébastien Favre, Supply Chain Directeur for VITACUIRE details the four reasons that convince him to choose Colibri:
- The simple methodoly and ergonomic screens that allowed to quickly visualize our data and process within the solution
- The collaborative aspect of the tool that perfectly fit our organization. The sales assistants are managing the accounts and the Key account managers are validating the sales forecasting plan. The sequencing and planning manager is in charge of validating the final forecasts plan.
- The reasonable budget of Colibri for a SMB like ours
- The advantage of having regular updates of the solutions based on the users’ requests.
Fully Autonomous on Colibri for a few months now, the users are very happy with the solution and the collaborative process is working well.
