Jeroen van der Laan 0:00:09.2:

I am Jeroen van der Laan, Supply Chain Manager at Royal A-ware. I've been with the company for the last seven years, mainly in the dairy supply chain environment. I would like also to start with a poll. We've had many polls already, one of them, are you in technology or in finance, but I would like to know who here is part of a supply chain team? Well, which is also quite a lot. I expected maybe to be a little bit less because many of the presentations have also been focused more on the financial part of the business. What I'm going to try to do is to explain to you our experience with an Anaplan implementation in the supply chain sector. I will be doing that first by talking a little bit about our history, then we will talk a bit about the typical challenges in the dairy industry, and a bit about our supply chain, and why we use Anaplan. First, Royal A-ware. We have a mission, and our mission is creating the shortest route from the cow to the customer. We believe in order to do so we need to own the entire supply chain, because if you only own one part of the supply chain, it's really hard to truly say that you can create the shortest route, because you're always dependent on other pieces in your supply chain.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:01:41.4:

That started a long time ago. I'm not going to start an entire history lesson because 1890 is a lot of years ago, but the first founder of Bouter Cheese was Peter Bouter, and A-ware started as a company, it's a family-owned company, where Peter Bouter would go to the market and sell cheeses. He would sell cheeses to people just walking by, basically like some of the people in the markets today, would sell 100 grams, 200 grams, so it started really small. Then we go many years in the future, Anker Kaas was founded. The father of the current CEO, [unclear name 0:02:15.9] Anker started Anker Kaas and he also, similarly as Peter Bouter, started selling cheeses on a very small scale. Many years ahead, his son became the CEO around 2000, and ten years later there was a merger into A-ware. It's a family-based company and it was merged in around 2010, and then things escalated rapidly because up to this point, basically Royal A-ware controlled a couple of warehouses, maybe two, but we were far off our mission, creating the shortest route from cow to customer. If you only own warehouses, you're not capable of truly saying, 'I own the shortest route from cow to customer.' You only are able to handle the cheeses that you have in your warehouse, and you can maintain them for customers.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:03:18.4:

Given the ambitions that our CEO has, he acquired in 2012 our own transportation company, so now we would be able to at least transport cheeses from our customers, to our customers, and to our warehouses. Then two years later, we had an opening of our own packaging plant, so now we are able to maintain our own cheeses, to ripen them. We were able to transport them, and we were able to grate or slice them for our customers. One year later, we even opened our own production plant, which means now we also have the ability to produce our own cheeses. Around this time, we also started to contract farmers, so that meant that we also had milk available. I would say around 2015 we could truly say that we owned all of the different aspects of the supply chain, and we could say, 'At least we have a route from the cow to the customer.' If it's the shortest route, don't think so, especially now in 2015, but we have a route. I think it speaks volumes to the rapid growth of the company, because if you start in 2010 with only one or two warehouses, and in 2015 you have basically the entire supply chain, then that's quite complex, but it didn't stop there.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:04:41.0:

In 2019, and I'm going to click on because it's many, many acquisitions and I'm not trying to turn this into a history lesson, we had many openings of plants in different places, like Ireland we have the opening of the mozzarella plant, and we basically tried to expand our portfolio, because until 2015, we really focus on cheeses. Later on, I'd say the last year, we also tried to focus more on whey, cream, the yogurts, so we wanted to diversify. Even in 2025, just to prove that we're still ambitious because we did a lot in the last, I'd say, 15 years, we have a pending acquisition of the Dairy Food Group in Belgium, which mainly focuses on the Bouter and also whey, cream, yogurts, all of the daily fresh products. A lot has happened in the last 15 years. Now, I have a question for the audience. In what year do you think A-ware has its supply chain department founded? It's basically from 1890. Any guesses?

Audience 0:06:10.6:

2025.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:06:14.8:

It was around 2015, so I'd say next year we have our ten-year anniversary. Apart from that, I would say the typical challenges in a dairy supply chain, some are common, and some are less common. One of them is it's a very fast-paced industry. Decisions we make today or this week are irrelevant. We can say well, we will wait a quarter, we'll wait a couple of weeks, or we'll wait a month; that's not how it works. It's very fast-paced, so we needed a supply chain department because we had so many different aspects of the supply chain, maybe somebody should take a look at it. Especially since COVID-19, I think everybody has heard of it, probably, there is an increased promotion pressure. What happens is that the prices have skyrocketed, especially for the dairy industry. Everybody knows I think that getting a bit of cheese in the supermarket goes to about €4 to €5, where a couple of years ago it would be €2. What retailers are doing, they know that somebody goes to, for example, Albert Heijn or a supermarket, even because the prices are lower, so it's a two-for-one promotion.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:07:32.7:

What Albert Heijn thinks is they don't care if they make money on their cheeses, all they want is to pull people in. That means that it could happen that suddenly, our biggest retailer says, 'I want three times the volume,' in a specific week, 'and it's your problem, you should handle it for us.' That's really difficult because it's hard to predict, because you cannot really use a financial motive, because they don't care, they just want people in. Another one is a short shelf life, I think that is quite self-explanatory when you're talking about milk, it's short shelf life. It's a natural product, which is quite relevant, because you think you have a specific batch which maybe you want to deliver to a customer in four weeks, but because cheeses are mold, it's not the most sexy term but it's basically a mold, who is to say that in four weeks you can still use that specific cheese? Anything can happen, it can have bacteria, it can go bad. You have to be able to act once that happens, because suddenly it's not there anymore, and when it's not fit for human consumption, it mostly goes to the pigs or the farming industry.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:08:53.5:

Age. Age is, I think, maybe one of the most unique factors in the dairy industry, because we have many different cheeses, and everybody knows - some people like young cheeses, some like old cheeses, but it's the same cheese. What matters is the age. What you do, you produce, for example, 20 batches of a specific cheese, and maybe you want to use one of them for the old and some for the younger, and some of them for the 18 weeks or whatever. If it's just one cheese with just one cheese code, how do you in the system then know where it is allocated for? It's just the same code and it has an age, but how do you tell the system for which age you want to use it? You can say, 'I just write a remark. I want to use it for the 18-week-old.' Sure, but what happens if the month changes? Would you still want to use it for 18 weeks? Would you, every time anything changes in the supply chain have to go over each and every batch for its intended possible age that you would like to deliver to the customer? That's quite difficult. I can tell you in Excel, it's quite hard, and we even had a homegrown ERP system that maybe it's even earlier than Excel, so we came from far, but that's why we started the supply chain in 2015, so we had a long way to go.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:10:33.6:

Temperature is very important. Just like you would put your vegetables in your refrigerator, once you put them in a refrigerator, the maturation or the aging stops, or at least it slows down. For us, we need to predict, because we have many warehouses, some are dedicated for ripening, some are dedicated for cooling, where do you expect your cheeses to end up? It's not like you can say if a warehouse that can contain the million kilograms of cheese, now it's cooling, now it's ripening, that's now how it works. Also, there's a large cost to it, because I think everybody knows if you have to put 10 million kilograms of cheese into cooling, especially with the newer prices for energy, that matters a lot. We have many more, but I'll go through some of them if it allows me. We have different milk types, which means that each cheese can have its own specific specifications. For example, some cheeses have to be made from milk which is not genetically modified. Some of them have to be [?medal 0:11:45.0] milk, which means that cows have to go outside for at least eight hours a day [?120 0:11:52.2] days a year, etc.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:11:56.8:

Those are all aspects that are really difficult to capture in an Excel, especially when you're just starting and you have to figure out where to put everything. This is how our supply chain looked last year. I'll first go from left to right, just in the chronological order as how you would see the resources go to an end product. I think that's quite clear. You start with the milk, the milk goes to your factory, in the factory we have some of the cheese would go directly to our customers, some of them go to our warehouses or external warehouses. If you expect not to have enough cheeses, then you'll probably buy them externally. Then once you have the cheeses, you decide can I deliver these cheeses to my retailers, should I slice them or grate them, or can I sell them as a whole cheese to our business-to-business customers? If you say it like that, it sounds quite easy because it's left-to-right, that's how it works. When we're talking about the fact that we did everything in Excel, and if I highlight a bit more the planning aspects of this supply chain, then what would happen is that we would have a milk planner on the left. What this person does, he balances the supply and amount of the milk.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:13:20.6:

Milk supply basically also depends on the weather, because if it's sunny then maybe the cows go outside, maybe they eat more grass, maybe they get more protein. It's quite hard to forecast milk supply. Based on that unreliable milk supply, the production planner then in turn can decide well, what kinds of cheeses do I need to produce? That again has two limitations, how much can I produce in my factories, can I produce it externally, and how much do we even need? That's then again decided by the match, demand and inventory department. That has an effect that keeps going back and forward, because if you decide to produce [unclear words 0:14:12.3] cheeses and these cheeses - for example, because you have more capacity than what you needed to have, you still need to make those cheeses. You can't say to a cow, 'Well, I don't need milk today.' You always need to produce given the milk that you have.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:14:32.9:

Then the department that matches supply and demand would get more supply. They then in turn obviously would say, 'Well, I need less next time.' That would go back to the production planner, which means that they would like to plan less, then the milk planner would say, 'Oh, hold up, I still have the same amount of milk.' Then in turn all of these different interactions, I'm not even speaking about demand planning because that's also an aspect, and all of the different external aspects outside of even our own department, are all aspects that are really difficult to maintain when you have many disconnected Excels. That's basically I think what you also said in your presentation. We had seven-to-eight different Excels that on a daily basis had different input, and each and everyone's input decided on the output of the other one, and we were always late. That made it quite difficult, and then I'm not even talking about people going on holidays, because some people like to use colors. They say, 'It's yellow so of course I don't have enough.' Okay. The other one uses a remark. The problem is people type remarks, but they don't delete them, so then you still don't know what's going on.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:16:00.7:

We needed something else, but why Anaplan? There are many tools. Why Anaplan? As I hope I've made clear, we have had an increasing complexity within our supply chain and we wanted to get rid of the Excels completely, because for us it didn't work, the Excels didn't work. We had the fortune that one of our financial guys already knew someone from our implementation partner, EyeOn, and therefore we got - it was quite easy to get in contact with them. Also, we had somebody - we already have Anaplan used for budgeting, so we were already a bit familiar with the system. EyeOn promised this and delivered, that we would be ablet to steer the supply chain with improved quality and less manual effort. The less manual effort part is true. I can tell you if you work with a homegrown ERP system, which has been created prior to having even a supply chain department, that's a beast. What we had to do, we had to copy all of the data from this homegrown ERP system into our Excels, but the homegrown ERP system did not allow copying, so we had to type over everything. That's a lot of work.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:17:33.4:

Now I have reliable data and make sure everybody works with the same numbers. You can imagine if you have milk kilograms or milk liters, there is a difference. Not everybody always knows that, but it really matters, the difference is around 1.03, I believe. Other people talk in kilograms, others talk in pieces, etc., and now everything is in the same number, so we all understand what we're talking about. We can now anticipate changes because basically, whenever anybody in the supply chain changes a specific variable, it's all being calculated in all of the models, which means that we have instant access to the latest information. That's really something we could not do prior to Anaplan, that we can do a what-if analysis. We can basically freeze a situation, which I believe in Anaplan is called Version management. We can freeze a situation and then simulate what would happen if we would, I don't know, acquire another plant maybe, could we? We do that a lot.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:18:43.4:

We have implemented two projects, and one of them was mostly focused on getting the entire supply chain with all of the Excels into Anaplan. If you remember the 2023 slide, we had basically the milk planning, end-of-the month planning, which were on the left and the right, were secluded in the first project, and everything else was implemented in Anaplan. In the second phase, and I think the second phase has something very special that was compromised of two different things. We had the space planning where we would be able to - because we couldn't even see on a day-to-day basis how much was coming in and how much was going out. Now, we are able in Anaplan to see, refresh every 15 minutes how many cheeses are coming in, how many are going in, and that's really helped us in the balancing act of are we not maybe getting in too many freights on the Monday instead of the Tuesday, because we simply did not know that, which might sound crazy, and now we know. The second part, and I think that's truly remarkable, Anaplan has made it possible for us that with the press of a button, the system gives us a proposal of the allocation of all open sales orders and all available batches, so that basically takes over and it's something unique to start trusting, because at first that seems really impossible, but it is possible.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:20:26.0:

With one press of a button, we are now able to get a report and send it to the department that basically creates all of the orders, and everything is in the system. You would almost not even use a human for that anymore, instead of pressing a button. I think that's very remarkable that that's even possible, especially if you consider where we came from. The Anaplan journey. The first phase where we basically implemented Anaplan over almost the entire supply chain took about six months, and the second phase took about three months, which has a smaller scope, so naturally it would take a bit shorter. We used a very Agile approach which I really liked, because we started with the design phase, because if you have many parts of the supply chain, you really need to make sure that your consultants, in our case the consultants of EyeOn, know your process, because you can't just focus on the singular part, you also really need to know how does one decision influence all of the other decisions and key aspects of every part of your supply chain. That took about, I think, five full days 8:00 to 6:00, long days but we got it done.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:21:50.5:

That was also one of the biggest risks, because we had quite a big scope, because we have many different elements that basically could ruin development, because of the large scale of the scope, but because we have had many different Sprint plannings design workshops and demo sessions, we were able to tackle this. In a demo session, for example, the consult of the modelers, they would show us what they would have developed, and we would even have the stand-ups whereby daily, basically Monday, Wednesday, Friday, they would in more detail show us what have we developed. We would be able to steer the project in a very detailed manner and for us that was really necessary. It also gives you as a client a bit of a feeling of control, which is always nice, especially when it's a really big project. I know I like that a lot. It finished off with [?Agility 0:22:55.7] training and go live. I think one of the most important aspects of this journey for us was that especially since our supply chain department is quite young, I would say. We had, I believe, a revenue of about 1.5 billion but no supply chain department, which is quite maybe remarkable. When we started designing our supply chain, we really got a lot of feedback also from our implementation partner, EyeOn.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:23:26.2:

They would tell us when we were wrong, and we really need to hear that sometimes. They have a lot of experience also in supply chain, they know many best practices, and for us, it would not necessarily be a discussion, but it would be collaboratively arguing towards the best result, I would say, which sounds a lot better. I think especially because we could do that on Monday, Wednesday, Friday every week, I think we got a better project than we asked for at the end. Also, I think because of this methodology. For who can remember, this is how our supply chain looked like in November 2023. This is how our supply chain looks right now. We have covered much of it in Anaplan and we're very happy about it. Very happy about it. We have some new projects. We are quite an ambitious company, we acquire a lot, we always want to grow, and we've seen that Anaplan is really able to help us make the right decision, so naturally if something goes good and it's a success, you want it to go on. Maybe some of you have noticed that we have left the milk planning and the demand planning out of our scope.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:24:46.7:

Naturally, what we wanted to do in the next few projects which start next year, demand planning has already started two weeks ago, we want to also include demand planning in our Anaplan implementation. We want to again reduce manual workloads. Somebody was saying Excel, again, typing in all of the information, doing in Excel all of the analysis, there is no advanced tooling or forecasting methodology, it's all just somebody who does it in his head, and it's even one person, so that's quite risky I would say. We want to increase forecast performance. We want to use the best-known forecasting methodologies and probably I can imagine that some computers could calculate and see specific trends better than we could do just by looking at them in Excel. For the milk planning, it's mostly a balancing act. We want to see what's going in, what's going out. We want to have that all documented in Anaplan and have that as an input towards the rest of the supply chain, because even if you have everything supply chain, which you like your input, then you can plan everything you want, but if the input is not correct it's not going to happen.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:26:09.9:

This is how supply chain looked in 2024, or looks right now, I should say. This is how we envision it to look next year. We have everything in Anaplan, we have everything connected, we can make better decisions, faster decisions, and I'm looking forward to it. Looking back and forth, I've said it many times, we have a big reduction in manual labor. I think Anaplan advertises for a reduction of around 20 per cent. For us, it's a lot more. I think 30, maybe even higher, simply because of where we came from. We have one source of the truth, so no longer are we discussing, 'Hey, my Excel says ten and yours says eleven.' It's all the same. We have immediate insight and relevant planning data, and therefore we can make real-time decisions. What's also very important, as you can imagine we had a lot of change management to do. If you even start without a supply chain, then you have one which is fully based on Excel, and then some years later you're completely killing all the Excels and going to Anaplan, we had some struggles.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:27:25.4:

I'm very happy to tell you that some of the quotes of the end users, our planners, are that they would never go back to the old way of working. They added something that I cannot put in a presentation regarding the manual labor they had to do, so I'm only going to show this quote. It's a nice overview, ready for presenting. What they used to do in 2023, they would have to make sure that all of the data is correct in the system. Once it does, they would have to make this data in a presentable format, and then they would need to hurry for the meeting to show all of this data. It was always a hassle. They would start, they would type everything, a lot of work. Now, it's just always ready for presenting. What I also think is really important for us, very early on in our supply chain we really focused on hiring smart, intelligent people. It's very difficult to retain smart, intelligent people when you ask them for 30 per cent of the time to type over information. That's really difficult.

Jeroen van der Laan 0:28:39.5:

I'm confident that now we have implemented Anaplan that we are better able to retain people, simply because they can do smart work and that's a game changer for us. We have some ideas. We have already basically covered our entire supply chain with Anaplan, but what we mean with the quote cover the whole cheese supply chain in Anaplan, is that we also have some smaller warehouses, some smaller production plants which have not yet been in the system. We also want to scale the system and include those. Last but not least, we are now very capable of making decisions based on volume, so we know where would you like to allocate some specific resources, but the system does not yet help us in telling us would it be smart to maybe use the milk, use to produce powders, or is it smart to use it to produce yogurts, or is cheese the right way? At this point, we don't know, and we hope that Anaplan can also help us making decisions on the value instead of just on volume. Those are future ideas after the [?new two 0:29:53.9] project.