Microsoft Dynamics AX implementation allowed to increase the company's efficiency
A large Russian manufacturer of bakery and confectionary products "Harris CIS" automated planning of production and procurement. The project was implemented based on Microsoft Dynamics AX. The partner of Harris CIS in the project was the consulting company Odyssey Consulting Group.
Harris CIS is the Russian division of Barilla Group, the world leader in the production and sale of pasta and sauces and the European leader in the confectionery segment. Harris CIS is a full cycle producer from development to realization of confectionery and bakery products. The company manufactures its products at a factory in Solnechnogorsk. To improve the efficiency of the business, the company needed to automate the planning of purchases of raw materials and production of products according to demand, based on sales forecasts and customer orders. Previously, planning in the company was conducted with the help of spreadsheets.
This method of work had both technical drawbacks associated with the difficulty of working with a single spreadsheet file, and significant business disadvantages: it was not possible to automate the coordination of aggregate planning with other key areas of the company, the actual data on procurement, production and sales were reflected in spreadsheets manually. One of the prerequisites of implemeting the summary planning module of Microsoft Dynamics AX in Harris CIS was a significant expansion of the range of products manufactured in Russia, and manual management of the product range growth would have significantly increased the business risks.
The company's management set the task of implementing a reliable planning system which would allow the demand for the output to be met. The project of implementing a solution to automate production planning in the company took six months. Before proceeding with the solution development, the Odyssey Consulting Group specialists organized a seminar dedicated to the aggregate planning for the purchasing department, sales department and planning department. The purpose of the workshop was to present the approach to aggregate planning, introducing the customer company employees to Microsoft Dynamics AX and gathering information for implementation.
We developed a report of Microsoft Dynamics AX, which exactly repeats for the specialists of "Harris CIS" accustomed to them the form of a spreadsheet. Otherwise, it is a new, modern solution based on the Microsoft Dynamics AX summary planning module. The module receives primary data from the system, automatically plans purchasing and production, and presents this data in the form of a user-friendly report.
Project Manager
The solution, based on the Microsoft Dynamics AX summary planning module implemented at Harris CIS, has four planning loops:
- Purchase planning for the medium term of 12-18 months and short-term planning with a horizon of 1 week to 4 months.
- Finished product planning, implemented according to MRP II principles, i.e. taking into account production capacity limitations, with a horizon of four months; and production output planning, scheduled by days with a horizon of one week.
- Planning contour for the distribution of finished goods inventories.
- Planning contour for the procurement of imported products from Italy.
The main results of the project were reducing labor costs for planning, improving the quality of planning by eliminating the manual planning in spreadsheets, maintaining the level of service by using the latest data on stocks and expected arrivals, increasing the discipline of the company's employees working with the IT-solution, the ability to control the timing and amount of procurement and production.
Due to the solution for aggregate planning based on Microsoft Dynamics AX, implemented by Odyssey Consulting Group, we have increased the business efficiency at the expense of sales management, production planning and optimization of inventory level
Yaroslav Prikhodko, an employee of Harris CIS support department comments
