Infor serves up integrated supply chain planning across Wedgwood Group

Infor has announced that Wedgwood, the English fine china producer, has selected an advanced supply chain management (SCM) solution to help improve its global forecasting and requirements planning capabilities; reduce inventory and boost the productivity of its supply chain across all operations.  Infor SCM Demand Planning is expected to go live in March 2009 for 30 users across the UK, Europe, Asia, Canada and Australasia.  

Wedgwoods acquisition of Royal Doulton in 2007 provided a catalyst to review its supply chain processes across the group.  Wedgwoods existing supply chain software had become inflexible, difficult to upgrade and was not aligned to the future needs of the business.  In contrast, the acquired business Royal Doulton was seeing substantial improvements to its inventory and forecasting accuracy following a deployment of Infor SCM Demand Planning software.  Following a validation exercise, Wedgwood decided to adopt the same solution for its global supply chain operations. 

Wedgwood selected Infor SCM Demand Planning because it contained functionality perfectly matched to its business requirements, and could easily manage the forecasting, inventory and replenishment  of Wedgwoods tens of thousands of products across the world.  The solution is expected to help Wedgwood improve visibility of its global supply chain through a combination of enhanced statistical forecasting,   collaboration across all its operations and tighter control over its inventory and distribution replenishment processes. 

  Our long term strategic vision is a more consistent, integrated approach to supply chain planning across all companies within the entire Wedgwood group of companies, and we see Infor SCM Demand Planning as a core component in making this happen, comments Stephen McAdam, IT director, Wedgwood.  Having witnessed the success of Infor SCM Demand Planning within Royal Doulton we were impressed with its depth of functionality, robustness and ability to scale to our global requirements.  The solution will help us to be far more proactive in the management of our supply chain which in turn, will enable greater focus and result in boosted profitability.

According to recent research by the UK manufacturers organisation EEF, improvements in planning operations is a key driver of IT investment, commented Andrew Kinder, director of product marketing, Supply Chain, Infor.   Wedgwood reflects this trend, moving to a business model which will require global visibility and control of its thousands of products.  Providing a unified view of demand, inventory and supply is consistently reported by our customers as one the greatest benefits gained from Infor SCM Demand Planning.

About Infor

Infor acquires and develops functionally rich software backed by thousands of domain experts and then makes it better through continuous innovation, faster implementation, global enablement, and flexible buying options. In a few short years, Infor has become one of the largest providers of business software in the world.