Building the Center of Excellence

Building and facilitating a Strategic Supply Chain Framework to better manage and instantly anticipate on their dynamics.

Assignment

Our customer is a large global FMCG company. Their network is complex with about 100 plants, almost 100 DC’s and thousands of customers. In addition, they were going through M&A, but also carved out specific business lines (e.g. coffee) requiring to run scenarios with & without these BU’s. Our customer wanted to start CoE’s on the main continents (EMEA, NA, Asia), because they do not have global customers.

Our customer asked for our support to building and facilitating a Strategic Supply Chain Framework to better manage and instantly anticipate on their dynamics and to answer questions like:

  • How many sites, where and how big?
  • What is the role of certain plants in the supply network
  • What is the direct plant shipment potential and how to unlock?

Project summary

Key challenges behind our customer request for building and facilitating a COE:

  • Our customer was in need for a baseline model that could help validate business decisions within a reasonable time frame.
  • Our customer had too many and different calculations that reflected current and known changes and carve outs.
  • The dynamics of the business, required many scenarios per geographic area to answer all questions and test the robustness.
  • Our customer had a high number of decision makers and stakeholders involved for signing-off each business decisions due to regional P&L.
  • The complexity and dynamics of the network required single and centered project management.

Our apprioach

Our customers’ mission was to standardize and leverage across continents, to simplify portfolio and to optimize E2E network to resulting in reduced cost.

Our approach was to develop single governance and single tooling across the globe. BCI supported our customer in this multi-year journey, in the EMEA region with the set-up of a strategic framework.

BCI set-up 3 pillars for the strategic framework:

Collaborative Process Networks

CoE as enabler for collaboration between (EUR) geographies: CoE developed Methodology, governance structure and tools. Internal/external knowledge and best practices came together and were used.

Network Design Methodology

CoE applies a single network design methodology, with focus on: annual renewal and reduction of external dependencies. BCI helped with first time set-up, renewals where rendered by customer themself.

Network Design Tools

Use of standard Network Design tool (Llamasoft SC Guru; BCI is among one of the largest tool-users globally).

1E-3

Result

EMEA

  • CoE approach added value: 10% operational improvement in EMEA was achieved
  • Full alignment at Central and Regional level (including Buy-in from Finance)
  • People trained still use the models; BCI occasionally checks in if support is needed

Take aways and learnings

  • Start with setting a clear business strategy
  • Focus on End-to-End optimization
  • Establish a robust governance to support the COE and the business