o9 Digital Brain for Food & Beverage

One of the world’s largest beer companies, owning a global portfolio of over 400 different beer brands.

This customer decided to replace SAP/APO for End-to-End planning across all time horizons, global roll-out across 32+ countries and leveraging best-in-class technology such as AI-based forecasting, MEIO, Control Tower, LP optimization and reverse logistics planning.

Sustainability Impact

Reduction of food waste and reduction of logistics expedites.

Business Scope Challenges

Forecasting

The forecast accuracy was low. Lagging indicators were predominantly being used in the forecasting process.

Opportunity

With o9, this company was able to incorporate internal and external drivers of demand into o9’s highly differentiated ML forecasting capabilities to boost forecast accuracy, reduce bias and provide insights to sales.

Scenario Planning

The company was unable to run fast and intelligent demand and supply scenarios. All of the key scenarios were developed in spreadsheets which led to suboptimal decision-making.

Opportunity

With o9, they ran advanced demand supply match algorithms (both heuristics and LP), taking into consideration all possible constraints (shelf life, campaigns, logistics capacity, storage, etc.) These were then accordingly turned into scenarios.

Planning in Silos

Key planning processes (demand planning, supply planning,S&OP, S&OE) across time horizons (strategic, tactic, operational) were all executed in silos without the ability to connect the dots.

Opportunity

With o9, the company got the unique capability of connecting all functions and all planning processes across all time horizons on one single, integrated, cloud native platform.

Value Delivery

Key Functionalities Implemented

The o9 Enterprise Knowledge Graph was used to build market, demand, and supply-knowledge models. This allowed for running all key planning processes for all categories, brands, channels, and accounts, across all time horizons on one single, integrated platform. o9 leveraged its open architecture to incorporate a proprietary developed LP solver in Gurobi and forecasting algorithms in R and Python.

Systems Replaced

SAP APO

Customer Benefits

Success Factors — 3 reasons why o9 was selected

  1. o9’s highly differentiated knowledge graph brings all key functions together on one platform, combining planning and analytics across time horizons to make much better decisions.
  2. o9 is the future proof platform encompassing continuous innovation in advanced analytics, NLP, solvers etc.
  3. The ability to connect market nodes to the upstream supply chain nodes. Enabling End-to-End visibility on constraints and costs by leveraging o9’s highly differentiated Digital Twin.

KPI Impacted

  1. Reduction of non-standard supply chain cost (flex and logistics).
  2. Significant inventory improvement.
  3. Reduction of lost sales.

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