Warburtons With FuturMaster Wins The Supply Chain Excellence Awards 2017

We are delighted to announce that Warburtons with FuturMaster is the winner of the Supply Chain Excellence Award 2017 in the category Demand Forecasting and Planning.

The Logistics & Supply Chain’s Supply Chain Excellence Awards recognise and reward organisations around the world that demonstrate excellence in their supply chain operations. These Awards were presented on the 14th of November at a glittering gala dinner at the Park Lane Hilton in London.

Warburtons with FuturMaster has fought off stiff competition from Pearson Education with Accenture UK, Granngården with RELEX Solutions and Symetal, subsidiary of Elval. The way Warburton’s business has gained improved visibility on future expected sales in a market that requires high accuracy and speed, in the light of the short shelf life of the product, gained the praises and appreciation of the judges.

With sales of £551 million last year, Warburtons, the largest bakery brand in the UK, manufactures and delivers daily to over 18,500 retailers. To do this, the company – which has doubled in size over the last decade – has had to focus on its supply chain and introduce new technology to help get its products off the shelves more quickly and streamline deliveries.

Thanks to the introduction of FuturMaster’s Demand Planning software, Warburtons has been able to increase the accuracy of its forecasts from 79 to 86%. The company can now project up to five years ahead and see what improvements can be made, and what cash benefits they will drive.

Planning promotions with retailers – often up to a year ahead – is another benefit derived from using the FuturMaster software. “FuturMaster allows us to very quickly analyse whether a particular promotion is realistic or not and see any resulting sales uplift” says Iain Bishop, Senior Commercial Forecast Manager at Warburtons.

Overall, Warburtons has been able to benefit from significant time savings – not only across its operations and production processes, but for customers as well – after implementing FuturMaster. So whereas previously there was a 65% to 35% split on administrative versus added-value tasks, now only 10% of time is being spent on admin, which has freed up 90% of time for strategic decision-making.

“We are very proud that Warburtons with FuturMaster has won the Supply Chain Excellence Awards 2017 against very tough competition. This trophy awards the great collaboration between the Warburtons and FuturMaster teams. This success reinforces FuturMaster’s mission to deliver tangible business benefits to our clients” says Michel Ramis, Executive Vice President at FuturMaster.