Case Studies

PRODUCTION SCHEDULING

Kekkilä-BVB

Kekkilä-BVB is the European market leader in professional growing media solutions, providing high-quality substrates and services to horticultural companies and consumers in more than 100 countries worldwide.

Kekkilä-BVB prides itself on having a strong focus on customer success and strives to deliver all products on time. Not an easy task given the thousands of customized products and high seasonality. This, combined with their core value of daring to innovate, led them to use Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) system. By combining the expertise of the planners at Kekkilä-BVB with the strength of APS, we were able to show impressive results.

APS was able to deliver 3-5% more orders on time (almost 100%), while using 5-10% less time and reducing maximum inventory in storage by 15-30%. Impressive results, especially considering that they were achieved based on data from 2020, when Covid 19 provided for a highly fluctuating demand and planning had never been such a difficult task.

APS is applied in 3 of their Dutch plants.

DEMAND FORECASTING

Bromelia Specialist

Bromelia Specialist asked us to help them learn as much as possible about consumer needs to help them grow and brighten the world with Bromeliads. By analyzing both internal data and search trends, we helped Bromelia Specialist gather more insights to help quantify and predict consumer demand.

We began by gathering information on product groups, competitive houseplants and trends in interior colors for England, Germany and France. By diving into the data and visualizing the results, we found interesting differences between countries that can be used over time to target specific consumer groups.

The next challenge is to integrate and use the vast amounts of available information to forecast years ahead to create data-driven, customized production plans. Since this can reduce the costly mismatch between production and demand, this is an area where much can be gained.