Charoen Pokphand Foods (CPF) is a $30 billion global food production company with headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand. 50% of CPF’s revenue comes from export to 40 countries— with two notable markets being Scandinavia and Germany. CPF has a diverse product range of fresh meats ranging from chicken, duck, beef, pork and shrimp.
Histoire de réussite
Charoen Pokphand Foods
Demand Planning, Supply Planning
CPF reduces carbon emissions and perishable food wastage with Blue Yonder
L'entreprise
Le défi commercial
CPF has a complex supply chain which is vertically integrated from hatchery, feed, farm, processing, and distribution across a diverse range of products. It distributes to 40 countries where consumers have varying requirements for the size and quality grade of its meats. Each animal (and sometimes species) must be raised, processed and distributed in different ways. This level of diversity and complexity was ill served by manual spreadsheets, which led to CPF being unable to respond to customers on expected shipment dates. CPF needed an advanced supply chain planning system to manage both complex demand and supply constraints whilst synchronizing multiple production sites across the Asia and Pacific region.
La solution
Deployed on the Microsoft Azure public cloud, Blue Yonder’s demand and supply planning solution was chosen for its end-to-end capabilities to help manage supply chain operations from hatchery to production right through to distribution. The solution also provides superior handling of reverse bill of materials (BOM)—where a single raw material can be disassembled into multiple stock keeping units (SKUs).
“Blue Yonder demand and supply planning software provides near real-time, end-to-end visibility of our incredibly complex supply chain. It has improved our sustainability metrics as we have reduced residual food wastage by 15% through better meat-cutting optimization.”
–Birasit Boonnam - Head of Aquatic Operations, CPF
Data lake provides end-to-end and near real-time visibility
Core to the success of the Blue Yonder demand and supply planning solution is access to CPF’s data lake which provides end-to-end visibility along the entire supply chain. This captures all the live information from hatchery, farm, production, and distribution to retail operations providing essential management information—reducing the time and improving the quality of information. The system provides a single source of near real-time information for CPF’s teams to access.
This data lake takes automatic feeds from Blue Yonder, IoT (internet-of-things) devices and cameras used in hatcheries and farms to monitor the growth and welfare of animals. At the other end of the supply chain, POS (point-of-sale) data from retailers is also recorded, ultimately providing end-to-end visibility from production to sales.
Improvements in sustainability metrics
A core benefit of Blue Yonder’s solution is its ability to reduce operational food waste and carbon emissions through intelligent, demand-driven production. By replacing manual Excel-based workflows with Blue Yonder’s demand and supply planning tools, CPF has achieved a 15% reduction in residual waste from its meat-cutting operations–all while continuing to meet precise customer requirements on size and quality.
Using Excel, the time to calculate the cutting optimization process previously took one week— which was not effective when dealing with highly perishable meat products where time and freshness is of the essence. Now, these calculations can be done in around one day—an 86% reduction in time.
The data lake is used to capture sustainability numbers based on actual versus planned key performance indicator (KPI) reports to measure food wastage, and energy consumption. This is essential disclosure for CPF’s exports to its European customers. The company can access data from the Blue Yonder system to calculate carbon emissions from its production processes. This system helps with sequencing the meat-cutting process to reduce production times. It also calculates any idle times and deviations to total the amount of energy used during the process.
The Blue Yonder solution also monitors the amount of time taken for animal feeding on the farms to calculate carbon emissions. Overfeeding is not only costly but also has significant carbon impact. With insights from Blue Yonder, the process can be optimized to balance the exact demand requirements with the timing and sizing of animals. This means a more precise feeding process to ensure the right size of animals prior to slaughter.
Artificial intelligence to predict demand
CPF incorporates down-stream demand data from retailers’ POS systems into the planning process and leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to improve demand predictions.
“I’m very happy with how well the Blue Yonder team works with the CPF team to help us use AI especially for predicting demand sizes, reduce inventory and produce the right product at the right time. AI helps feed our decision-making with more information and faster than we’ve ever had before. Things change so fast in the fresh food business and AI can really help with demand predictions. The more dimensions we have on our demand, the more we can reduce inventory and complexities in our factories.”
–Birasit Boonnam - Head of Aquatic Operations, CPF
