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Quintiq to Manage InBev's Distribution |
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Thursday, 07 February 2008 |
InBev, the world's leading brewer, recently announced that it would incorporate the Quintiq planning system to manage distribution across Western Europe. The focus: to smoothly adopt to a changing beverage market.
"InBev selected Quintiq to manage its complex first line distribution all over Western Europe because of its flexibility in dealing with country specific details and the ease of configuration," says Patrick Mullie, transport manager, Logistic Development Western Europe at InBev. "This gives us the possibility to easily adapt to changing market conditions. Our main objectives are to optimize the transportation cost, increase synergy between inbound and outbound flows and a dynamic planning of distribution lanes and carriers."
The Quintiq planning system will have to combine Full Truck Load (FTL) and Less than Truck Load (LTL) between plants, ramps, sorting centers and customers, explains the company. The first implementation is scheduled to go live in April 2008 in Germany with Ordina Belgium as the integration partner. There are 100,000 of these trips expected per year starting from five different plants.
One of the major challenges, however, is to get good integration between outbound to customers and inbound empty recoveries. The solution will have to support carrier allocation, driving regulations and continuous moves. The planning application will provide an automatic scheduler that can generate a reasonable first solution base and a flexible and transparent environment for a planner to further interact with the planning. The planning horizon will be between 24 and 48 hours, the company repots. |
