Demand forecasting and planning is more accurate

Baking plant is using demand forecasting and planning software to accurately work out capacity needs and feasibility and make educated, intelligent decisions over accepting or declining orders.

Peter Hunts's is one of Britain's major producers of savoury bakery products, supplying both the retail and food service sectors.

The company has grown progressively since its formation in 1971, and was one of the founding companies of Lyndale Foods in 1996.

Today the company operates from a purpose-built bakery in Kearsley, Bolton, where further investment in pastry mixing, puff pastry lamination, product make up, decoration, freezing and packing during 2006 has seen capacity increase to over 4,500,000 units a week.

In addition to supplying major supermarket chains and key players in food service, Peter Hunt's is the key supplier of baked savouries to Hampsons and Sayers, a high street baker that is part of the Lyndale family.

In terms of the company's production planning operations, everything had been reliant on basic spreadsheets together with knowledge and experience key personnel held in their heads.

In recognition of these and a number of other manufacturing constraints, Peter Hunt's made the decision to source a state-of-the-art demand forecasting and planning software solution.

It was at this point that FuturMaster began to play a major role in the company's day-to-day production operations.

* Historic constraints - "When we relied on spreadsheets we largely got by, but from a back-up perspective - when production staff were off sick or moved on - problems occurred," explained Simon Aspinall, Peter Hunt's Demand and Forecast manager.

"It was mainly down to two or three people to undertake all the planning tasks and work out demand.

So, when one of these people wasn't around it was difficult for other members of staff to cover his production tasks effectively due to the lack of stored production planning data." * Searching for the solution - management had been aware for some time of the problem and of the need for a new software solution.

However it was not until early in 2005 that two main catalysts resulted in Peter Hunt's decision to source a demand planning and scheduling software package.

The key drivers were growing capacity constraints due to an increase in customers and order volumes, together with the arrival of a new managing director.

The new managing director wanted to ensure that if key personnel were absent, information was available and easily accessible; ensuring operations could run efficiently as usual on the shop floor.

"FuturMaster was our first choice as the provider of a suitable demand planning and scheduling software package, largely because Peter Hunt's had known about the brand prior to the current installation," said Aspinall.

"However, as is often the case, other software vendors caught our attention in the early stages of making the purchasing decision.

Nevertheless, after a series of demonstrations from other prospective software suppliers, it became apparent that FuturMaster software had been the most suitable from the outset.

"The initial presentation we received from FuturMaster in early to mid-2005 concentrated on the forecasting database," explained Aspinall.

"This was because that was our primary concern at the time.

Initially I thought the information the system was simply showing me was what I already knew, but when I took a step back I realised that for people with less experience it would be very easy to understand and use in the utilisation of everyday demand forecasting tasks.

Therefore, if I was not on site operations could continue to run efficiently." * System of choice - Peter Hunt's then began looking at the system's production planning and MRP functionality, and were impressed enough to obtain the appropriate finance and approval from Head Office to place an order for a FuturMaster software package.

The initial contract with FuturMaster was then signed towards the end of 2005, with implementation beginning in January 2006.

"We put together a detailed plan of action with FuturMaster's consultants concerning timelines for implementation and go-live for various modules," said Aspinall.

"The consultants then followed the time path through, pointing out to us what module would be available on what day, and they were on the whole very fast and very accurate." Peter Hunt's ended up about three weeks behind schedule at the end of the anticipated five-month implementation period.

However this was mainly due key personnel at Peter Hunt's taking time off for holidays and a few similar obstacles.

* Progress - by the middle of 2006 much of FuturMaster's functionality was fully up and running, with other elements progressing apace.

"We are still not 100% reliant on the system for our demand forecasting, planning and scheduling operations as yet," Aspinall pointed out.

"For example, we are still at the point where we are comparing our old spreadsheets with what FuturMaster is telling us, just to make doubly sure we are on the right track.

However, we are rapidly getting to the stage of moving on from comparing FuturMaster with the spreadsheets to comparing the spreadsheets to FuturMaster, so FuturMaster will soon take over completely." Historically, MRP related tasks were undertaken using spreadsheets.

"It was all basic formulas that relied on this cell plus this cell plus this cell," explained Aspinall.

"When we updated the spreadsheets the formulas often got mixed up because it was easy to look at the wrong cell simply due to human error.

So we would face all sorts of production problems because of mix ups in prioritised materials orders, and so on.

With FuturMaster in place these issues will be eradicated straight away.

It will tell us immediately what we require in terms of food materials." * Work in progress - the final part of the FuturMaster implementation - production scheduling - is ongoing, but from the outset that was due to be written as the rest of the software's implementation progressed.

Aspinall elaborated: "We now have the planning side in place, which tells us precisely when we need to make a particular product.

As a bakery we have tight timelines and other production issues such as minimising our changeovers by running jobs in logical sequence.

We start the week with fruit products, cheese products or vegetarian.

Then we move on to meat goods.

If the sequence is organised the other way round we incur massive wash downs and of course we cannot produce during this process.

So in order for Peter Hunt's to be as agile as possible with regard to ensuring all production follows the best logical sequence, FuturMaster is currently writing a scheduling tool that will automate and optimise this procedure.

Many of us thought this wouldn't have been possible, but having seen initial test results we have been really impressed by the system." * Forecasting and planning - on the forecasting side, FuturMaster will be able to work out what capacity will most likely be required for each job - based on shifts, storage and cost.

"It will allow us to work out our required budget on a day-to-day basis so, with future forecasting information included, we will be able more accurately to work out our budgets for the next financial year," said Aspinall.

"The forecasting information can be fed straight into the planning module, which can ensure we are aware of what we need to make over a given time period and how to plan production on the shop floor as efficiently as possible." Also, from the customer perspective, FuturMaster is helping Peter Hunt's to understand current sales trends in order for the company to ensure it is in a position to react quicker and in a more agile manner when order patterns (goods, quantities, etc) change.

"In the past we have simply looked at historic order patterns over the previous few weeks," explained Aspinall.

"With FuturMaster, we will have a better idea of what is happening, what's going to happen, and forecasting whether it is likely to happen again based on historical ordering patterns." * Product promotions - in terms of production planning, Peter Hunt's can now determine what effect a customer's product promotion will have on production in any period of time and forecast required capacity.

"We do not want to commit to something we cannot deliver, but in the past we have tried to guesstimate whether we would be able to manage extra capacity requirements within a certain timeframe," said Aspinall.

"Now, with FuturMaster, we have something far more concrete, and can more accurately work out capacity requirements and feasibility based on other production tasks etc We want to ensure that when we say we can deliver something that is exactly what we mean, and within the specified lead time.

Now everyone can look at FuturMaster and make educated, intelligent decisions regarding accepting or declining orders, rather than relying on one or two people trying to verbally convince them of the feasibility of a job." * The future - in addition to ongoing implementation of production scheduling functionality etc Aspinall anticipates a much needed link to Peter Hunt's existing business software package: "Eventually, I would like to see a link between FuturMaster and our business database, so FuturMaster could automatically generate purchase orders for our suppliers.

Historically, the spreadsheets have told us what we needed to order, leaving us to manually key in the related data concerning costings etc Again, automating the generation of purchase orders through FuturMaster will further cut out the chance of human error and also save a considerable amount of time.".

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