Accelerating Sales & Product Planning Cycles
Senturus moved the client off Excel as a planning tool and implemented a centralized, consolidated solution. Providing fast, accurate access into sales and production data, the new system reduced the client’s planning cycle from days to hours.
Challenge
The client is a large winery with dozens of distinct brands in its portfolio. It was using multiple disparate Excel workbooks, managed by different departments, to produce and maintain sales and production plans. The planning cycle took days and version control was impossible. Issues included
- Product list and hierarchy updates were not coordinated; differences existed between related plans.
- Synchronizing plans required hours of data manipulation.
- Excel worksheet changes resulted in calculation errors.
- Changes by management in assumptions, volumes and attributes (e.g. production line assignments and capacities) required time-consuming reworks of Excel workbooks that took days to complete.
Solution
Senturus implemented a centralized, consolidated planning application that utilized data from web-based forms and linked sales and production plans. With the new system, updates are completed within minutes instead of days and changes are quickly factored into production plans and updates.
Capabilities incorporated into the new system included
- Case unit planning for selected, non-vintage products and distributors.
- Vintage-specific bottling production plans within production line capacities.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system part numbers automatically mapped to planned products.
- ERP customer sales automatically mapped to distributors.
- Historical patterns used to create future plans.
Benefits
Management can quickly evaluate what-if scenarios for production and sales, allowing them to confidently make strategic planning decisions. Benefits include the ability to
- Change the timing and volume of the sales plan to view impacts on the production plan.
- Add a shift to a production line to evaluate the impact in the current plan.
- Change the production line assignments for specific products and re-evaluate.
- Add new products, assign them to a production line, and change the product roll-up structure; then enter a sales plan and evaluate its effectiveness.
- Change the yield formulas ( e.g. from gallons to 9-liter equivalent cases) and rerun the wine run-out calculations.
With the planning cycle reduced from days to minutes, changes can be quickly factored into plans and updates.
About our client
Headquartered in Napa Valley, CA, this producer of high-quality, affordably priced varietal wines represents more than 50 global wine labels.
