Challenge
With thousands of stores in North America and a wide variety of meat-based products (beef, chicken, pork, fish), which are consumed daily, a large quick service restaurant (QSR) chain needed a high-performance manufacturing and logistics system to maintain their high service level standards. Their goal was to design the best supply chain with respect to total landed cost, service levels and improved manufacturing technology. As most options involve long-term investments, they sought an optimal balance between achieving best performance in today’s market while accounting for potential uncertainties.
Solution
The QSR chain chose SCA TechnologiesTM because it is one of the only software suites in the industry which can provide insight into the implications of strategic decisions made in manufacturing as well as logistics. The functionalities and business constraints provided by SCA Planner™ allowed managers to:
- Optimize the number, location and capacity of the plants for total supply chain performance
- Incorporate contingency needs in the supply chain design
- Enable product diversity by the selective use of new manufacturing technologies
Results
SCA Technologies’ strategy helped the QSR supply chain to restructure the design, capacity and capability of their manufacturing network. That led to a reduction of 5% – 10% in many of their commodity supply chains. In addition, the new design enabled the QSR chain to support higher product diversity in its markets by identifying and enabling the opportunity to predict and manage the variables associated with new products. Finally, the new design takes into account potential changes in commodity prices, impacts of regional labor markets and changes with demand volume/demand profile.