Wolfberger selects Ortems planning software to improve the percent of fill and decrease inventories

Wolfberger group, expert in the wine, sparkling wine and spirits industry with 12% of Alsace AOC (Controlled Origin Label), produces more than 14 million bottles annually, of which 23% are dedicated to exports. For the past five years, this Alsatian company has seen its revenues and volume of orders increase steadily with significant growth in export markets.

To support its growth, the Wolfberger group has selected Ortems solutions to model its medium-term planning processes using Ortems Master Production Schedule (MPS) and its short term planning with Ortems scheduling software.

This approach is part of an effort to continuously improve and monitor its process activities. It builds upon a commitment to rationalization, responsiveness and adaptability with a constant concern for the quality of service provided to customers:

• The Master Production Schedule will be prepared over a 12-month timeline for wines and from 24 to 36 months for sparkling wines (returned to the cellar 12 months before packaging).

• Scheduling will be done over a 2 to 6-week timeline.

Mathieu Greffe, Industrial Director states:

"Our inventories represent significant tied up capital (approximately 2/3 of our sales). We need to manage our supply chain to optimize our finished goods inventory (more than 1,200 SKUs) and to plan the packaging process, which must be highly responsive in order to manage the different sizes of work orders, which can vary from 96 to 13,000 bottles.

Before selecting the Ortems solution, we carried out a company-wide strategic project, including rationalizing our production facilities and investing in the renewal of some of our machinery. One of our objectives is to increase our productivity as well as our responsiveness.

Choosing a planning solution like Ortems gives us a stake in the future by being more responsive and qualitative in the face of international developments in our premium market and the size of orders (smaller volumes but increasingly frequent).

The internationalization and challenges of exporting increase the range of SKUs with more complex labeling, which we must be able to anticipate. Our project is based on wines and sparkling wines.

Subsequently, it will also include our "distillery" business. Our expectations include improving our inventory coverage for finished goods and components and also improving our service rate while simultaneously improving our responsiveness and visibility.

Henceforth our planners will be able to focus on higher added value tasks and spend more time analyzing the master schedule in order to make the right decisions with all the parties concerned (technical, sales, production and supply chain).

We chose Ortems over competitor solutions because we greatly appreciated the product's ease of use, the expertise in the wines and spirits business as well as the high professional standards and availability of all of the team."