The Groupe Danone is one of the major international corporations in the food industry, with major brands in the fresh dairy products, packaged beverages and cereal biscuits and snacks, including Dannon, Danone and Evian.

The fresh dairy products division in Mexico operates from two manufacturing facilities. The product line includes over 120 sku´s and its national distribution network is composed of 3 main distribution centers and 30 local depots.

With the ongoing expansion of the product line and changes to the configuration of the national distribution network, programming and coordinating daily deliveries from the plant to the distribution centers and local depots had become too complicated for the tools and methodologies at hand.

The Supply Chain division had as an objective the improvement of customer service levels, the reduction of losses related to the perishable nature of the products and the reduction of overall plant to depot transportation costs.

To accomplish these objectives, Grupo Danone commissioned from TechnoLogix the implementation of a continuous replenishment system that would:

:: Forecast daily demand by depot and product, for the coming 3 weeks.
:: Adjust depot inventory control parameters as a function of forecasting accuracy.
:: Derive daily depot requirements by product.
:: On a daily basis, assign available plant inventory to meet these requirements.
:: Build the daily loads and routes to deliver this inventory.
:: Schedule daily deliveries to meet plant dispatch capacities and depot time windows.

The entire project took 8 months to completion. The system interfaces with Danone´s corporate J.D.Edwards ERP system, importing daily operational data and uploading the detailed delivery schedule. A number of performance indicators, graphs and management reports allow users to monitor and analyze daily performance.