Jarden Consolidates Supply Chain
For nearly 100 years, Jarden Consumer Solutions (JCS) has provided consumers with products that make their lives easier and more fun. Its brands include Oster, Crock-Pot, Sunbeam, Rival, Bionaire and Mr. Coffee. Forecasting Philosophy
Operationally, JCS is decentralized across four semi-autonomous regions: United States, Latin America, Canada and Europe. Each of these regions has different processes and protocols.
The United States region is divided into two main strategic business units: appliances (products like blenders and mixers) and personal care and wellness (heated blankets and scales fall in this category). Forecast managers are assigned to an individual category or brand within these two units.
Customers, like Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, Kohl's and Bed Bath & Beyond, are central to JCS' forecasting philosophy. These large key retailers help support its collaborative forecasting process as the forecasting team receives information from these large accounts. Meanwhile, JCS' smaller customer forecasts are run statistically and are based on an exception-based review of the data.
New Visibility
The company has a tradition of growing organically and through acquisition. For example, it doubled its size by acquiring Holmes Rival in 2005. The need to streamline and consolidate all of its brand's supply chain processes under one flexible solution became apparent.
Historically, JCS was unable to support intra-company collaboration because of a lack of integrated exception capabilities, which led to an ineffective exception process. "We did not have a consolidated view of demand. We could see our domestic numbers and international numbers, but we could not see them together, so performing global capacity planning was an issue," explains Richard Shapiro, JCS senior director of forecasting.
JCS chose Logility Voyager Solutions to help provide the visibility needed to increase forecast accuracy, streamline product/ brand introductions, assess promotions and create plans attuned to market demand.
Emerging Opportunities
With new visibility, JCS could focus on two opportunities to streamline its supply chain: globalization of its demand planning process and the development of an exception-based process.
JCS' geographic regions have historically conducted business separately, from different exception definitions to disparate enterprise resource planning systems. There is also a difference in forecast ownership from region to region. For example, in the Latin America region, forecasting is conducted in the sales function. In the U.S., forecasting takes place in the supply chain organization.
With supply chain process globalization in mind, JCS addressed these challenges, established corporate goals and objectives, came to a consensus on process definitions, created a cross-region steering committee and established an exception-driven process as a key driver.
The exception-based process was a significant process change. The forecasting teams deployed global best practices for exceptions and standardized timing for the monthly cycle. Ultimately, the five-day, exception-based process helps the teams focus on where they can make the biggest impact each month.
Streamlined Success
The globalization and exception-based process led to a company-wide streamlined supply chain.
"Our forecast accuracy continues to improve, and the process helps to explain and improve on forecast variability" says Shapiro.
Less time and financial resources are spent on forecasting. Forecasting best practices are now able to be leveraged across all regions of the company.