The UK’s favorite baker, Warburtons, boosts shelf freshness with Unison Planning™

OMP for S&OP and for Operational Planning and Scheduling was implemented at 10 bakeries and 16 depots. The solution allows Warburtons to better allocate capacity to demand, assess the impact of strategic decisions, and plan and schedule production to be as efficient as possible, which is essential for their business.

“We want to give our consumers the freshest product,” says Rebekah Hinton, Head of Manufacturing Planning at Warburtons. “We therefore need systems that allow us to proactively plan production as close to the point of sale as possible.” This requirement called for a smooth interaction between strategic planning, operational planning, scheduling of production and packaging, transport planning, and real-time integration with SAP.

It also involved a strategic switch from local to centralized planning. Ian Mallinson, IT Director at Warburtons, confirms the benefits: “We now have a really excellent integrated production planning solution, ensuring that all our bakeries work together in a well-organized way to give us the best balance of freshness, service levels and cost. This has been a challenging project, but we made it through the commitment and dedication of everyone involved, including OMP.”

Jos van Heiningen, Customer Solutions Manager at OMP, is delighted with this successful implementation: “We established a solid collaboration with Warburtons’ project team to jointly put in place this innovative and pragmatic solution integrated with SAP. We were also very happy to see that Warburtons were able to roll it out to the other product categories without needing any more help from us.”