Elly Yates-Roberts |
Mars-owned pet food manufacturer Royal Canin has started to implement FuturMaster’s cloud-based demand planning software, which uses Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) for C++ and C# projects, to improve efficiencies worldwide.
Royal Canin creates 3,600 products and 2,500 tonnes of pet food each day in sixteen factories worldwide. As such, the company uses FuturMaster’s demand and replenishment tool to control inventory levels and forecast transportation needs.
“Many of our products, often prescribed by vets, are there to cure ailments through better pet nutrition, so product availability is our obsession to secure the health of the 21 million cats and dogs we feed,” said Pascal Waller, director of Global Supply Chain at Royal Canin.
According to Jared Hayton, head of Logistics and Customer Care at Royal Canin USA, a rising demand for specialty pet food has made managing the supply chain increasingly complex. The Microsoft TFS-based tech is expected to help manage this complexity, by supplying the right products at the right time.
“We’re virtually doubling our capacity after adding three plants in the last three years. FuturMaster delivers the automated supply and demand management capabilities all in one system so everyone is in total alignment and sharing the same data,” said Hayton.
Having used the planning software in France for 20 years, Royal Canin will now deploy it in over 20 markets over the next three years. US factories saw the upgrade in June 2018 and Australia in early 2019.
“We chose FuturMaster’s cloud solution as we wanted to be able to deploy it quickly and easily across the organisation and because of Mars’s group strategy to move all applications to the cloud,” said Waller. “We like the flexibility, free maintenance and updates from a cloud set-up.”