Don’t be Haunted by a Supply Chain Nightmare Every Halloween

As well as providing an opportunity to dress up and celebrate, Halloween is a fantastic, profitable opportunity for the consumer goods sector, with the retail value of Halloween in the UK rising by nearly 40% over the past four years.

With brands such as Sainsbury's, Morrisons and ASDA spending big on Halloween campaigns, this time of year now represents a huge opportunity for UK retailers. Meeting the huge spike in demand requires a coordinated effort across the entire supply chain to ensure breaks are avoided and the additional cost of storing excess goods prevented when there is more materials or stock than required.

Harvesting over two million pumpkins

The supermarket ASDA has revealed that a 'good summer' has helped ASDA pumpkin growers to produce a bumper crop, with nearly 2 million pumpkins hitting the shelves this year. Due to weather conditions, the pumpkins will also be bigger than ever with varieties weighing up to 30 kilos!

Halloween is a season and retailers plan for the peak, meaning our British pumpkin retailers are faced with a multitude of challenges to get their product to market, in good condition and on time. With seasonal aisle spaces rapidly changing and dedicated to Back-to-School, followed by Halloween, and then Christmas, demand must be planned and executed to ensure good solid inventory management.

To provide forecasts that are as accurate as possible, demand forecasting systems must be able to balance historical sales data with market intelligence. This may include weather or raw material availability. Crucially, forecasting has to be responsive to potential changes in the market. Last year in the UK, non-food Halloween accessories sales increased by 12.5% compared to the previous year, while pumpkin volumes were up 13.1%. The companies able to predict that increase and align the supply chain accordingly could seize that opportunity.

"Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) and Integrated Business Planning (IBP) can most simply be described as advanced S&OP. However, unlike S&OP,  IBP brings a truly strategic perspective, integrating diverse processes (in the extended supply chain, product and customer portfolios, customer demand and strategic planning) into one seamless management process". Oliver Wright

• Integration with SAP Supply Chain Control Tower
• Forecasting and demand management
• Inventory optimisation
• Sales and operations planning
• Response and supply planning

Learn how Rocket are helping manage the pumpkin supply chain this Halloween!

Our customer, a leading consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturer and marketer of branded consumer garden products, has been managing very seasonal business demands with manual planning processes that are very iterative and time consuming. They have also had to deal with the complexities of constrained warehouse and production capacity, and raw material supply constraints.

This situation was making it impossible for the business to break the cycle of reactive demand-and-supply adjustments, resulting in regular production capacity problems and too much inventory.

This was compounded by the challenge of managing across seven global sales offices that were independently creating sales forecasts without any consensus between them and independent demand plans onto shared suppliers (both own and outsourced) at different times and across multiple iterations, resulting in poor forecasting accuracy.

Learn how we provided the client with three key success factors using the Rocket Cloud Accelerator Methodology for SAP IBP in our Current Projects.

SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)

Core to Rocket’s supply chain optimisation capability is the focus on all-encompassing, best practice solutions driving collaboration, insight and action.

As a recognised leader in inventory planning and optimisation, with SAP IBP we are helping address variability and uncertainty within the supply chain and enabling supply and demand to be optimally balanced. Embedded communication, modelling capability and analytics are allowing the visualisation of processes in real-time, seamlessly enabling data sharing across the extended enterprise.

Rockets in-depth understanding of supply chain solutions built over many years, combined with our detailed knowledge of SAP solutions, allows us to tailor solutions to your specific needs.

Contact us about SAP IBP and learn more about how we are helping our customers to manage seasonal business.