The year kicked off at AVI, where we expanded their implementation to also include the planning of imported goods, going live in January.  Additional to this we assisted them with a custom solution to do tactical warehouse capacity planning, which greatly eased the management of the impact of fluctuating and inflated sales during the lockdown period.

Late 2019, Digistics, the distributor for various QSR companies including KFC and McDonalds, awarded us their planning rollout.  We went live with BForecasting in March 2020.  The closure of restaurants and take-out venues as a result of the national lockdown caused the dynamics of the projects to change overnight. The traditional Barnton way of testing and training had to move from boardroom training, to individual training via Teams. The project experienced several delays due to availability of people and resources, but by August BPlanning went live, followed by BDeployment in November 2020.

At KFC, we upgraded BForecasting to a newer version, which delivered enhanced functionality to do promotional forecasting.  This rollout proved to be quite complex in nature, as promotions are typically entered at menu item level (e.g. the burger) which is then translated through a bill of material to ingredient forecast level.

COVID-19 brought new opportunities for us to solve. Most of our customers were forced to shift the focus to scenario planning on a weekly basis.  The need was to create multiple scenarios of demand and supply outcomes based on the constantly changing situation. We innovatively and rapidly developed a temporary solution to update the forecasts across all the products in mass, based on very short-term historical recovery patterns.

Phase one of CIRO imports planning in BPlanning version 3 was finalised during the first quarter.  The second phase of this upgrade is on hold due the impact of COVID-19 on their business, as they are major suppliers to the heavily affected tourism industry.

We also used the time during COVID-19 lockdown to complete the BForecasting implementation at Ascendis Pharma.

United National Breweries were heavily affected by the COVID-19 regulations which delayed the Barnton rollout that started in the third quarter of 2019, but finally BPlanning went live, and they used the solution for what-if planning for COVID-19 scenarios. After the lockdown we also finalised the raw materials planning rollout.

RCL Chicken went live with a custom solution enabling modelling of full allocation of all available incoming birds into portion types and SKU’s. This is fully facilitated in- and integrated with BPlanning version 3. This was yet another example of how well we manage to find a 100% fit for customers in the FMCG and QSR space.

Clover was our first customer in 2002, so it was wonderful news for us when they asked us to upgrade to our newest BForecasting version. It was a hugely complex implementation, but finished of a difficult year with yet another success story.

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