COMPANY: Sara Lee Frozen Bakery
WEBSITE: saraleefrozenbakery.com
INDUSTRY: Food & Nutrition
JOHN GALT SOLUTION: Atlas Planning Platform
Results:
- 20 ppt increase in forecast accuracy and 16 ppt improvement in bias
- 10 ppt increase in case fill rate
- Significant reduction in inventory write-offs (70%) and redeployment compared to previous years
- Significant improvements in manufacturing, distribution, and supplier reliability
- Major savings across the end-to-end supply chain
Company Overview
Sara Lee Frozen Bakery is an industry-leading maker of frozen baked goods founded in 1939. The company’s growing family of brands includes Sara Lee®, Chef Pierre®, Van’s®, Bistro Collection®, Superior on Main® and Cyrus O’Leary’s®.
Headquartered in Chicago and with bakeries in Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, and Washington, the company offers more than 600 products across retail, foodservice and instore bakeries, serving approximately 900 unique customer ship-to locations.
Not as Easy as Pie
Following the company’s sale from Tyson to Kohlberg & Company, Sara Lee Frozen Bakery grew quickly through acquisitions while simultaneously becoming an independent organization – operations, distribution network, enterprise systems, etc. Additionally, the company’s supply chain was navigating through an environment of increasing demand uncertainty. This variability made it challenging to accurately forecast sales, effectively manage inventory, and drive collaboration across its value chain.
Sara Lee Frozen Bakery needed greater visibility across its supply chain to handle increasing supplier constraints, including shortages of ingredients, packaging materials, and pallets. Decreasing on-time delivery rates, network congestion, and capacity constraints from third-party logistics providers and carriers added to their challenges. Furthermore, rapidly increasing costs such as rising prices for ingredients and packaging, as well as elevated carrier freight rates, placed greater pressure on the company's bottom line.
Despite its esteemed heritage in the industry, Sara Lee Frozen Bakery challenges were amplified due to it recently becoming an independent organization. The company's supply chain grappled with the complexities of reacting to variability and disruption versus having the visibility to proactively plan.
Recipe for Success
Recognizing the vulnerabilities in its supply chain and the need for transformation, Sara Lee Frozen Bakery took steps to address the hurdles. These steps included growing and upskilling the company’s supply chain team, maturing its Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process to improve alignment and decision-making across the organization, and implementing advanced supply chain planning software technology to elevate planning capabilities and drive business growth.
The combination of the right people, process, data, and technology were the key ingredients to Sara Lee Frozen Bakery’s success. The company made it a priority to bring in the right people into critical roles across the supply chain. Once the right people were in place, the team sought a strategic technology partner to help power its transformation journey. The company selected John Galt Solutions to implement the advanced capabilities of the Atlas Planning Platform. Implemented during Sara Lee Frozen Bakery’s ‘Pie Season’, Atlas delivered Service, Cost and Cash results.
Sara Lee Frozen Bakery developed a winning supply chain transformation recipe that led to breakthrough results. In the first year since implementation, the team increased forecast accuracy by 20 percentage points and reduced bias by 16 percentage points. Additionally, the case fill rate improved by 10 percentage points over the previous year, reflecting stronger service metrics and enhanced customer satisfaction. These improvements streamlined operations and resulted in substantial cost savings, plus a 70% reduction in inventory write-offs and redeployment.
The Atlas Planning Platform helped facilitate significant enhancements in manufacturing, distribution, and supplier reliability, contributing to a more resilient and efficient supply chain for Sara Lee Frozen Bakery. The notable improvements in these areas have led to major savings across the entire supply chain, reinforcing the company's competitive edge and its positioning for sustained success.
“Technology plays a huge role in our supply chain maturity journey and John Galt Solution’s Atlas Planning Platform has the capabilities that can enable our journey – from bringing external data into our planning processes, to probabilistic planning, automating decision-making, data-cleansing, and more. With Atlas, we have the options available to us to become an effective and decision-centric team.”
Laura Shannon, Vice President of Planning and Logistics at Sara Lee Frozen Bakery.
