The year 2019 continued the trend of go-lives, picking up new flagship customers and having fun at the same time!
The Imperial rollout completed in February 2019. We implemented a solution to do warehouse capacity planning and experienced with them the thrill of taking on new clients and seeing major service level improvements in just four weeks after transitioning to the new system.
The first quarter of the year the main focus was to implement Siqalo Foods (the former Unilever margarine). They went live with SAP and three Barnton modules (BForecasting, BPlanning, BScheduling) on the same day. That was a first for Barnton – normally we go live one module at a time, but the excellent collaboration between our implementers and their IT team ensured a smooth (as butter…) transition. Additional development was required on BScheduling to facilitate the overall requirement, which once again proved a growth opportunity for our toolset.
We continued to upgrade existing customers to BPlanning version 3. RCL Beverages went live in July and RCL Pies in August.
We also celebrated a new version of our forecasting tool, which now facilitates flexible promotional editing. BForecasting V2.4.3 went live at RCL Foods in September. It was extremely satisfying to receive the following feedback: “Barnton team! You ROCK! My work is sooo much quicker with this mass function. Thank you!”
The year 2019 brought another new customer when United National Breweries selected Barnton as their planning vendor of choice. Their products are highly seasonal with month end peaks and very short shelve lives. Our vast experience with integrated daily and weekly forecasting processes were invaluable in this instance. BForecasting went live in September, followed by BDeployment during November. The short shelve life (6 days!) tested our skill and ability to the maximum, and once again provided a growth opportunity.
Towards the end of the year we assisted our long-standing customer Danone with a short-term need, by rolling out a very basic setup of BScheduling in only four weeks! The focus was to rip and replace the existing redundant solution, and later improve and expand the implementation.
In a normal year, eight go-lives would already be a big achievement. In this case, the Imperial go-live was across almost 100 of their clients and multiple depots, and the United Breweries deployment implementation across 35 depots, proving once again we can deliver, and that we really are becoming the FMCG and QSR market planning provider of choice.
