How Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions Makes Better Decisions with Enterprise-Wide Planning

Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions (FHCS), the winner of the 50th Anniversary Legend award of this year’s SAP Innovation Awards 2022, has been providing market-leading cleaning solutions that keep millions of homes worldwide hygienic and safe since 1849. 

The Challenge: Planning in Silos 

At the start of the project, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions, which operates in 35 countries, had a disjointed supply chain planning process. Information was collected from multiple, disparate data sources, and planners were using different tools. This hampered the company from having an enterprise-wide view. The company also wanted to improve forecasting accuracy by harnessing the power of intelligent technologies.

Achieve 10x faster-planning cycles despite having larger data volumes 

FHCS integrated its landscape built on SAP ERP and SAP Business Warehouse with specialized forecasting in SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP). This enabled the company to generate simulations, planning, and reporting solutions based on SAP Analytics Cloud. Connecting the sales, and financial data with production volume data and establishing a single centralized data warehouse enabled planners to understand the profit and loss impact of different planning scenarios. 

“Shifting descriptive analytics to predictive analytics is a huge undertaking for most companies in their digital transformation. With enterprise-wide planning, we built a simulation platform to establish confidence in our predictions and ensure a smooth transition to predictive steering,” said Jochen Moelber, CIO of FHCS. 

Switching from a highly decentralized forecasting process to harmonized planning and forecasting helped Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions significantly improve decision-making. In addition, it helped the leading company to generate more granular planning down to an individual product and customer. 

By standardizing forecasting processes across its consumer products division, the household products manufacturer increased planning accuracy and enabled an enterprise-wide view that resulted in 10X faster-planning cycles despite larger data volumes and greater granularity. 

Act fast when disruption happens 

Siloed processes and disconnected systems are the nightmares of businesses. They not only make it difficult to get an overall picture across the entire company but also make businesses vulnerable to possible risks. Supply chains have been experiencing various challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this means that supply chain planners need to get harmonized, detailed, and enterprise-wide forecasting information to run the business effectively. 

“In a rapidly fluctuating market and with continuing supply chain challenges caused by the COVID- 19 pandemic, forecasting is crucial for us. We need it to ensure we produce enough of the right products at the right time and understand the financial impact of various planning scenarios on our P&L. By harmonizing our planning processes across multiple regions and business functions, we can align operational planning with financial performance,” said Franco Giacomini, Vice President Consumer Europe, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH. 

It now takes Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions only 2 days to create an initial top-down production plan at the beginning of the planning phase. Combining both operational and financial data as well as detailed product volumes and raw materials helped their business achieve greater transparency. With advanced simulations, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions can now generate immediate insights into the impact of variables on product groups and their operational impact on different planning scenarios.  

Save significant time with reporting automation 

Carrying out planning processes manually by using spreadsheets is not only a time-consuming activity but also error-prone, which adds more anxiety to the ongoing supply chain processes. Knowing this, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions aimed to standardize and automate reporting across different regions. 

“By helping harmonize our planning processes across multiple regions and business functions, SAP Analytics Cloud enables us to align operational planning with financial performance,” FrancoGiacomini explained. 

With a simplified planning process and straightforward user experience enabled by SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, non-technical business users gained the ability to explore data and run complex simulations. They also spend less time on repetitive report preparation, which frees up the team for higher-value work – such as analyses of future trends.  

Would you like to learn more about how Integrated Business Planning solutions can help supply chains be more resilient? Check out the recent IDC Analyst Connection “Build a More Resilient Supply Chain”.