Labeyrie already dates back half a century. The company was founded in 1946 in the Halles de Bordeaux food market, offering foie gras, Adour River salmon; and game at their stall. From its onset, the company has consistently affirmed its position as a leader in fine food; whether by organic growth or acquisitions.
In 2017, the Labeyrie Fine Foods Groups, encompassing Blini, Labeyrie, Delpierre, and l’Atelier Blini, among others, generated €988 million in revenue. They boast a workforce of more than 5,390 people and operate out of 17 sites across Europe.
A Challenging Objective…
From cocktails to desserts, as well as starters, the Labeyrie Fine Foods group offers a wide selection of gourmet foods. However, this considerable product range sometimes makes it difficult to forecast sales, procurement, inventory, and product planning.
Labeyrie’s main challenge has been to improve their forecast accuracy and optimize the scheduling while maintaining high service levels.
Magali Fidan, IT Project Manager at Labeyrie explains:
“Our target is a service level of 98.5% or above, ensuring that moving forward we are providing the most reliable forecasts possible to plan and keep ahead of our production requirements.”
…For a Challenging Supply Chain
To better understand Labeyrie’s challenges, it is important to understand how their supply chain works. The following are some important elements to take into consideration:
- Variable product shelf life ranging from 16 days to 4 years
- Highly varied range covering three of the group’s four business units
- High-quality raw materials used in seasonal and fresh products
- Seasonal ranges during which 52% of the brand’s annual turnover is generated in two months
- Raw material procurement requirements
- Short product life cycles
- The impact of promotions on sales: customers and large scale retailers operate on a just-in-time basis and have rapidly changing export requirements.
Labeyrie’s team quickly realized that they needed a tool that would enable them to handle the variability of their supply chain and forecasting more accurately, while also dealing with the seasonality of their products.
Labeyrie’s Need for an Integrated and Flexible Supply Chain Solution
They started with a large tender list of potential suppliers, and went through their essential requirements from a forecasting tool to establish a short list.
Laybeyrie chose QAD DynaSys as their supply chain planning solution as they felt it fully met all of their needs and satisfied wishes across all departments.
According to Stéphanie Irigoin, Labeyrie Customer Supply Chain Manager:
“The implementation of the solution was particularly instrumental in centralizing forecasts and bringing them to the core of our process. Everybody got what they wanted, thanks to the various reports they requested, whether that is operations, sales management, management control, or general management.”
Finally, QAD DynaSys’ Demand Planning and Production Planning solution has allowed them to plan ahead within their S&OP approach, and to increase agility, reliability, anticipation, and data centralization.
Together, these advantages have enabled Labeyrie to achieve a 99% customer service level, and to maintain their best-in-class performance.
