Barneveld - 10 June, 2010

Infor, a leading provider of business software for mid-market companies, today announced that Farm Dairy, a private label producer of daily fresh dairy products, has completed the deployment of Infor SCM Advanced Scheduler (AS) at their facility in Lelystad, The Netherlands. The solution helps Farm Dairy to optimize their planning process and is expected to yield operational cost savings of around 100,000 euros a year. Farm Dairy produces 180 million litres of dairy products per year and delivers those products via retail channels as well as directly to other producers of daily fresh dairy.

News
• Farm Dairy chose Infor SCM AS following a review of the market. The evaluation showed that only a few providers offered suitable solutions for their particular requirements. Dairy planning has to deal with a number of industry-specific challenges including push-driven milk supply, fast turnaround bringing dairy from tanks to stores within six hours and the scheduling of liquids in tanks. Most of the planning packages did not provide these unique capabilities or the flexibility to support the speed of the process.
• Prior to the implementation of Infor SCM AS, Farm Dairy relied on Excel spreadsheets to schedule operations on the different product lines for milk with various fat contents, yogurts and puddings. As data was often entered twice, the system proved to be time-consuming and error-prone.
• Furthermore, with changing production processes, Excel reached its limit. As customers demand daily freshness and a wider variety of flavours, the individual production batches became smaller. With Infor SCM AS, Farm Dairy is able to factor the constraints of tank and silo capacity and the flow of product between them including shelf-life, maturation times, storage restrictions, and overlapping processes into production scheduling.
• In the decision for Infor SCM AS, the solution’s depth of industry-specific functionality and Infor’s know-how and experience in the dairy industry was paramount. The positive references from major dairy producer FrieslandCampina, a 49.9% shareholder of Farm Dairy, played a role as well. FrieslandCampina has been using Infor SCM AS for several years, and is very satisfied. Infor also received a high score for lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

“A major advantage of Infor SCM AS is that it provides for planning around bottlenecks. Also, the quality of the planning process does not depend on individual knowledge and experience any more. In the past, the amount of stocks depended heavily on who did the planning, but now a range can be programmed as the default, and planning takes place within specified boundaries,” says Wim Meiling, Manager of Logistics at Farm Dairy. He continues: “With the planning system, we expect to reduce our stocks by at least one third, minimize waste and save up to 100,000 euros per year.”

An interesting benefit to the whole chain is the ability to improve quality. Infor SCM AS offers insight into the shelf lives of raw milk. Meiling explains: “Raw milk can only be in a tank for 24 hours. But we know from experience that that can go wrong. Infor SCM AS also shows which tank machine to use. If you improve the quality of the milk, that benefits the whole chain.”

What We Say
“Thanks to the optimization of the production process, Farm Diary can improve its efficiency,” says Pieter Leijten, Vice President Supply Chain, Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Moreover, Infor SCM AS ensures that the schedule is transparent.”