Improved Service and Reduced Costs with Supply Chain in Anaplan

From a technology perspective, most planning at JUUL was done manually in Excel. The IT infrastructure consisted of a home-grown ERP tool and a PLM tool which housed much of the product and raw material data. As plans were generated in Excel, poor data integrity led to inaccurate plans which caused increased costs and decreased customer service levels.

From a process perspective, JUUL manufactures most product in China. The product is then shipped on vessels to a global distribution network and distributed to markets. Due to long lead times and inaccurate plans, JUUL was forced to make constant inventory allocation tradeoffs. This led to a lack of internal and external alignment of plans, increased inventory costs, and supply chain capacity bottlenecks.

From a demand planning perspective, JUUL gained the ability to forecast at the customer level. Using Anaplan for S&OP, JUUL is able to share forecasts in real time internally and formally conduct a demand consensus review as part of an Integrated Business Planning Process. The impact to forecast accuracy is an immediate increase.

The supply planning solution enabled the JUUL supply planners to optimize inventory, view network capacity constraints, and identify when out of stocks may occur in advance. This solution directly improved working capital costs and case fill rates.

From a raw material planning perspective, robust scenario planning allowed the JUUL team to make trade-offs for item and supplier substitutions while costing out total material spend.

JUUL’s integrated business planning process will help JUUL be more proactive as they continue to grow and make educated decisions to support the business both short and long term.

JUUL partnered with Accelytics to standardize and optimize their planning processes, both technically and functionally. Accelytics created a multi-phased project timeline leveraging its proprietary Accelerated Approach Methodology. This enabled the JUUL team to implement an in-depth supply chain planning solution in a 26-week time frame.

The solution focused first on creating accurate forecasts in Anaplan. These forecasts were then sent to the supply planning team which planned distribution requirements, master production schedules and optimized inventory inside a very robust Anaplan model. Once production requirements were finalized, a BOM explosion happened inside of an BOM costing application to project material costs. Through all of these models, JUUL had robust scenario planning to compare multiple “what if” scenarios side by side. All of the info from demand, supply and procurement fed into a Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) application enabling JUUL to understand future bottlenecks, capital expenditure impacts and align finances with operations and sales.