Reinventing Sales & Operational Planning in Food Manufacturing

A national confectionery & snack bar manufacturer was seeking to transform its production planning and inventory management processes. Despite having a well-established ERP system that provided demand forecasts, the manufacturer struggled to create an agile and reliable production plan due to a high volume of last-minute make-to-order (MTO) requests and complex allergen-based line constraints. The goal was to move from a heavily manual planning process to a dynamic, responsive system that could streamline S&OP operations, reduce planner workload, and improve execution reliability.

Challenges in Production Planning

The production planning team faced a number of operational challenges that were creating inefficiencies and misalignment between supply and demand:

Manual Planning Processes:
While the ERP system generated demand forecasts, the team had to export the data into an outdated Excel workbook built by a contractor years ago. This spreadsheet - complex, undocumented, and poorly understood - was the backbone of the planning process. As a result, even minor updates became risky and time-consuming.

Allergen Constraints & Line Assignment:
Each production line could only run certain products due to allergen handling requirements. Assigning SKUs to lines was done manually, with planners spending hours reworking plans to account for cleaning windows, allergen changeovers, and urgent MTO orders.

Reactive Planning for MTO Orders:
The team received last-minute MTO orders almost daily, disrupting the established plan. Since the system was not designed for dynamic rescheduling, planners resorted to manual adjustments, often overriding ERP forecasts with ad hoc changes, which made performance tracking nearly impossible.

Planner Workload & Tribal Knowledge:
Managing the planning Excel sheet had become a full-time job for an entire team. Over time, a few key individuals became the only ones who truly understood how the spreadsheet worked, creating single points of failure and a lack of resilience in the planning function.

Putting Flexibility at the Forefront

The manufacturer realized that a new planning solution had to prioritize three key principles:

Operational Agility:
The ability to rapidly re-prioritize and re-sequence production runs in response to urgent MTO orders and inventory shortages - without starting from scratch every time.

Allergen-Aware Scheduling:
An embedded logic layer that could automatically account for allergen restrictions when assigning SKUs to lines, minimizing changeovers while maximizing throughput.

Ease of Use & Maintainability:
The new system had to be intuitive enough for planners to adopt quickly and flexible enough to evolve over time - without relying on external contractors or cryptic Excel logic.

Building a Smarter S&OP Process

The company partnered with internal and external stakeholders in operations and supply chain to build an improved S&OP planning capability with the following enhancements:

Dynamic Production Scheduling:
Orders could now be automatically slotted to lines based on product compatibility, allergen rules, and line availability. Planners could visualize and adjust the schedule via a simple workflow.

Real-Time Scenario Planning:
Planners could run simulations based on forecast changes or urgent MTOs to understand the downstream impact on line capacity and delivery commitments.

Automated Alerts & Capacity Management:
The new system provided early warnings on capacity overload, allergen-related conflicts, and raw material shortfalls, enabling planners to act before problems cascaded into missed shipments.

Centralized Visibility:
All plans and assumptions were housed in one source of truth - accessible across teams - eliminating reliance on the legacy Excel file and reducing planning cycle time by over 50%.

Outcomes

The manufacturer reinvented its sales and operational planning process, with measurable business impact:

• Reduction in Planning Time: By eliminating the need for manual scheduling and spreadsheet-based logic, the team reallocated hours toward proactive planning and coordination.

• Fewer Line Changeovers: With allergen-aware scheduling, changeovers were reduced by 20%, resulting in more stable production runs and higher line efficiency.

• Improved Responsiveness to MTO Orders: The team could now integrate urgent customer requests into the plan within minutes, not hours - without disrupting the broader schedule.

• Increased Cross-Functional Confidence: With clear visibility into the plan, production, inventory, and sales teams were better aligned, leading to fewer stockouts and more consistent order fulfillment.

By embedding flexibility, intelligence, and simplicity into their planning workflow, the manufacturer turned a long-standing bottleneck into a competitive advantage - one that scaled with their business and empowered their people.