SABMiller South Africa drinks to supply chain success

Rudi Van Schoor, program manager at SAB, says the system is to be deployed throughout the company's operations, including 70 warehouses and 12 production plants. Phase two will then see rollout to its other SABMiller regions. Van Schoor says he expects Infor's SCM solution to increase accuracy of demand forecasting and the visibility of resources throughout SAB's supply chain. This will help improve on-time delivery performance and cut excess inventory, he says. "Infor SCM Demand Planning will be used to drive our sales and operations planning, enabling shorter, easier planning cycles and quicker responses to market changes," says Van Schoor. "Our goal is to improve forecast accuracy, leading to better stock availability at the point of purchase. We also expect to reduce costs as a result of more accurate forecasting and precision planning." SAB will also deploy Infor SCM Advanced Planner and Advanced Scheduler to optimise and integrate planning and scheduling across five soft drink plants and seven breweries. Van Schoor explains that this will enable the company to dynamically deploy production of a given product for a given market to the most cost-effective plant. Planning will also take into account transportation, production and inventory costs, instead of tying each product for a given market to a single location. Van Schoor expects this to facilitate continued production when a plant is either closed for maintenance or increases in capacity when production needs to be boosted to support sales promotions.