BYK is a leading global supplier of specialty chemicals. The company’s innovative additives and differentiated solutions optimize product and material properties as well as production and application processes. Amongst other products, BYK’s high-performance additives improve scratch resistance and surface gloss, the mechanical strength or flow behavior of materials, and properties such as UV and light stability or flame retardancy. BYK also produces measuring and testing instruments that serve to effectively assess appearance and physical properties.
To better react to market changes and expand its competitive edge, BYK saw the need to select and implement a new supply chain demand planning system.
Integrated Approach to Address Demand Planning Processes Holistically
The company was challenged with inefficient, diversified, and isolated supply chain demand planning processes on disparate legacy planning systems that impeded forecast accuracy. Therefore, the goal was to enhance data and process transparency and establish one source of truth for sales, operations, and demand-planning processes.
BYK found that the SAP Integrated Business Planning application for demand, a cloud-based application with comprehensive capabilities, could best meet its goals to harmonize demand planning processes across the organization and improve forecast accuracy. In addition, the company decided to use the SAP Supply Chain Control Tower solution, enabling the company to get real-time visibility and control over its supply chain.
For the implementation and deep solution know-how, BYK sought help from SAP Services and Support and the SAP Preferred Success service, which included architecture planning, implementation guidance, and process reengineering expertise. Moreover, SAP helped deploy SAP Integrated Business Planning for demand and SAP Supply Chain Control Tower in a technically standardized and lean way.
Enabling All Functions with a Single Source of Truth to Improve Decision-Making
Major benefits BYK achieved include:
- Improved collaboration by implementing a harmonized and automated demand planning process
- Simplified and integrated planning practices for sales, demand planning, supply chain management, controlling, and strategic supply planning teams with more than 200 users
- One platform as a single source of truth for improved data quality and process transparency across sales, operations, and demand-planning processes
- Increased forecast accuracy with real-time data reflecting changes to planned demand
- Quantity- and value-based planning for all planning teams to make decisions based on financial impact
“With SAP Services and Support, we successfully implemented SAP Integrated Business Planning for demand and SAP Supply Chain Control Tower, enabling precise and accurate demand planning,” said Matthias Beenen, Supply Chain Process Management, BYK. “This is critical to supply chain efficiency and for delivering high quality service to our customers.”
“In the future, we will continuously work on optimizing the implemented processes and extend SAP Integrated Business Planning for demand by adding subsequent supply chain planning processes,” he concluded.
Karin Fent is senior director of Customer Success for Digital Supply Chain at SAP.
Top image courtesy of BYK.