Royal Boon Edam a global market leader in entry solutions, was looking to shift towards a combined business model of “made to stock” and “assembly to order” – where modules which could be placed into a configuration requested by the customer would be ready for production, this meant the company needed a different logistics approach to fulfilling these orders.
An interview with Boon Edam’s Aron Waas
Implementing Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) has many benefits.
To truly leverage it to improve business performance and predictability, you need to embark on a change management process and you need the right technology to self-enable your team.
Often, teams think they also need plenty of clean and accurate data to do it right.
But starting small can pay off. We spoke with Aron Waas, Global Supply Chain Director at Royal Boon Edam International to hear about his company’s experience.
Hello Aron, can you tell me more about Boon Edam and your role as Global Supply Chain Director?
Boon Edam is a private, family-owned company that is over 140 years old. We are a manufacturer of premium entry systems, such as revolving doors and security access gates.
We have 3 factories, one in the USA, one in China and one in the Netherlands (in the city of Edam). We have over 20 sales subsidiaries and, at this stage, 3 different Distribution & Support Centers.
These centers (or D&SCs) support our sales subsidiaries with all their inquiries, service requests and the delivery of products and services.
I am part of the global management team, responsible for everything that has to do with supply chain management. The directors of our D&SCs report directly to me.
You are currently using AIMMS to enable your S&OP process. What was the driver to look for S&OP technology and how did you do things before?
We have worldwide demand for all kinds of products and services and as I mentioned before, we have 3 different factories. We were trying to optimize the workload between these factories to have our manufacturing be as efficient as possible.
We had a financial reporting tool and based on the financial forecasting of our different sales subsidiaries, we made a forecast for products and services which was translated into a monthly demand plan and a capacity plan. This process was based on a lot of assumptions.
Read more at Why You Don’t Need Perfect Data to Begin Implementing Sales & Operations Planning
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