- The company profile
Volma is a federal manufacturing company, Russian brand №1 on the market of dry construction mixes, drywall and gypsum blocks.
Today “Volma” has 7 manufacturing plants and more than 2000 employees.
The company pays special attention to environmental protection and therefore produces eco-friendly products and improves energy efficiency in production.
The company is planning to modernize manufacturing processes, increase productive capacity by launching new sites and, as a result, to offer the market the best system solution for the execution of construction and finishing works according to global standards.
- The project tasks
“The company understood that further development was impossible without increasing of planning quality, both operational and annual” – says Sergey Malakhov, Head of planning department in “Volma”. – “We were searching for a solution that would allow us to build a process of collecting, recording and approving of different factors that influence the accuracy of demand forecasting.
At the beginning of 2018 we decided to implement the forecasting system “Novo Forecast Enterprise” developed by Novo BI.
The system attracted us by its functional opportunities and also easy integration into existing IT architecture, which would allow to use Novo Forecast Enterprise within the frameworks of S&OP process. Calculated forecasts are basic data for scenario planning of production that will be processed by other program complexes”.
- Project results
- the economic effect of implementation of Novo Forecast Enterprise is 3.5 mln USD per year;
- employees of the company use forecasts in the process of daily production planning;
- the structure of stocks in the factories’ warehouses has normalized (inventory turnover has increased);
- employees of the sales department see the benefits of the transparency of the planning system, since the factors they have introduced are personalized production orders;
- the level of customer service has increased;
- risks of not delivering orders by transport have been reduced
- the cost for product storage has decreased;
- the number of production plan adjustments has decreased.
"Company “Volma” has chosen a rational strategy when implementing the system – to do the project in 2 stages: to implement ready-to-use solution that allows to get a sales forecast in a short time and as a second step, to expand the functionality of the system considering existing company’s tasks," says Alexey Baturin, COO of Novo BI. “This approach has a number of advantages for the customer:
- Fast launch of the forecasting process, which allows to increase the accuracy of sales forecast almost immediately, and therefore to correct the production plans;
- Engaging employees from different departments into the process;
Further, when the system has already started to work and the actual operational experience has occurred, it is possible to define the requirements for additional functionality. You know exactly what else should be in the system”.
“I would like to note the convenience and usability of the program. The input and the factor system is very informative, easy to use, and has a variability in the choice of parameters. Cross-factor links can be considered as an additional convenience when the period of the factor and the product range coincide within the same geography".
Dmitry Kravchenko, Demand planning manager in “Volma”“A Forecast by days is used for creating a daily schedule for production. A forecast by months is used as a base for creating an operational plan”. – continues Dmitry Kravchenko, Demand planning manager in “Volma”
Cross-factor links can be considered as an additional convenience when the period of the factor and the product range coincide within the same geography. Analytics server allows to make high-quality solutions. At the 2nd stage of the project we asked Novo BI to add a factor that was absent in the system – “trade actions”. Specially for that a workplace for trade marketing specialists was approved and developed, where all main parameters of trade actions (quantitative, costs) were consolidated. It allowed to simplify the work of trade marketing specialists significantly because earlier they had to calculate trade actions in Excel, coordinate them in a paper or electronic format and insert a coordinated trade action into SAP ERP.
Now an employee can simply log into Novo Forecast Enterprise environment, where he creates and coordinates a trade action, then the action will be automatically considered in the calculation and correction of the forecast and also recorded in SAP ERP”.“A significant advantage of Novo Forecast Enterprise is making forecasts with automatic selection of the best forecasting models in terms of accuracy. This dramatically increases the accuracy of decisions and the speed of interaction with related departments".
Dmitry Kravchenko, Demand planning manager in “Volma”
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