Better business plans create better results.  

With an enhanced planning capability, our clients typically experience a 15-20 percentage point improvement in forecast accuracy and realize significant hard savings within a few months.  Top and bottom line growth objectives are met by increasing service levels and allocating investments in sales, marketing, capacity, and inventory with a more targeted, growth-oriented focus. The following case studies showcase the results for some of our clients:

Church & Dwight Co., Inc   |   DuPont Color and Coatings Technologies   |   Nalco Company

Church & Dwight Case Study
Few companies can claim an iconic brand that has been linked to everything from the Statue of Liberty to “the secret” in your refrigerator. But then again, few companies are Church & Dwight.

Founded in 1846, Church & Dwight Co., Inc. is the leading U.S. producer of sodium bicarbonate, popularly known as baking soda, a natural product that cleans, deodorizes, leavens and buffers. The Company’s ARM & HAMMER brand is one of the nation’s most trusted trademarks for a broad range of consumer and specialty products developed from the base of bicarbonate and related technologies.

Challenge
Church & Dwight has an impressive track record of delivering growth and shareholder return. The company has continued to smartly acquire new businesses while simultaneously improving its ability to organically grow existing businesses.

Church & Dwight realized that supporting future growth objectives meant scaling business planning capabilities – moving away from manual forecast reviews and overrides – to an automated process that leverages the full capabilities of planning system investments.

Solution
Church & Dwight teamed with Digital Tempus to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the planning process. Working side-by-side with the planning team, Digital Tempus helped Church & Dwight effectively combine the capabilities of JDA Manugistics, SAP, Siebel, and retail data sources to increase accuracy and align plans.

Results
By significantly reducing, and in several cases eliminating, the use of forecast overrides, business planners have more time available to review trends and derive insights from customer demand data – highlighting opportunities that help the company execute on growth initiatives.

“Working with Digital Tempus has helped our Demand Planners make better planning decisions and improve the accuracy of our customer forecasts. Digital Tempus understood what we needed to become successful forecasters and tailored their expertise to our systems and abilities.”
— Shara Fash, Manager, Demand Planning, Church & Dwight Co., Inc.

DuPont Case Study
Planes, trains, and automobiles are only the beginning. DuPont paints add color to more everyday items than you may have imagined. DuPont Coating & Color Technologies represents one of five key businesses within the $29 billion company — ranked seventy-fourth on the 2007 FORTUNE 500 list.

Color is a critical attribute of any brand or fashion; making the dynamics of consumer preferences a source of market excitement and business complexity. There is a science behind the art of color that is also changing.  DuPont is at the forefront of innovation — leading the way with advancements such as eco-friendly, waterborne refinishing paint technologies.

Challenge
Every industry encounters business and market dynamics, and the coatings and color technology industry is no exception. DuPont realized that its aging configuration of enterprise planning processes and systems were not keeping up with the demands of the business and market. The company was missing a planning capability — and the expanding gap was starting to pressure operating cash flow performance.

Solution
DuPont teamed with Digital Tempus to close the performance gap — tapping into our extensive expertise to optimize planning processes and systems, including JDA Manugistics and SAP. We shadowed the DuPont team through multiple planning cycles, running side-by-side with their process and data to demonstrate more accurate techniques for business planning and forecasting.

Results
With the help of Digital Tempus, DuPont achieved a significant improvement in forecast accuracy, simplified planning processes, and improved operating cash flow by increasing customer service and reducing non-productive operating expenses.

"With Digital Tempus we have a partner that understands our business, the planning systems and, as an independent body, adds a sanity check to our business planning process. We had a fantastic experience with them. They are pragmatic, conceptually very strong, meet commitments and deliverables, and they have always kept the same capable people directly on the project.”
— Filip Buytaert, Demand & Business Development Manager Refinish EMEA, DuPont Performance Coatings

Nalco Case Study
When Nalco needed to reinvent its planning process to support its global growth plans, Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) driven by business leadership was identified as a critical capability for the company. However, senior executives knew that achieving alignment and ensuring cohesive business management in a diverse, global organization with disparate processes and systems would prove to be a challenge and the company turned to Digital Tempus for assistance. Nalco needed to focus investments in growth opportunities and believed that demand-driven planning practices would align Nalco with the market and result in manufacturing and blending efficiency, as well as optimized inventories in order to increase cash flow.

Nalco Company, Past and Present
Nalco Company has grown from a fledgling water treatment business to the world’s leading integrated water treatment and process improvement company in the more than 80 years since its creation, with more than 11,500 employees serving nearly 50,000 customer locations in more than 150 countries in industry, government and institutions. Corporately, the business aims to help ensure optimum and trouble-free operations in the customer’s plant, mill, mine, and drilling environments through the prevention of water and process-related problems and proactive process improvements. In 2009 Nalco had annual sales of $3.75 billion. It is organized into two divisions, Water and Process Services (WPS) and Energy Services (ES).

In the company’s 2008 Annual Report, Nalco’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer J. Erik Fyrwald noted, "While successful in 2008, we are not yet operating at peak levels, having not met our expectations for inventory management and resulting Free Cash Flow due to poor inventory management. To address this head on in 2009, we have put supply chain management directly under business control to fully connect our supply chain with business operations. We added capabilities to establish world-class Sales and Operations Planning processes, a fundamental change to enable inventory reductions to be accomplished simultaneous with improved customer delivery service levels. We also combined the former Paper Services and Industrial and Institutional Services divisions into a new Water and Process Services Division to drive operating efficiencies. These changes will deliver results starting in 2009."

Turning to the Experts
Nalco needed to supplement internal leadership with a team of experts that could develop a process that would prove valuable to Sales and Marketing – connecting market knowledge and demand drivers to portfolio decisions and operational demand and supply planning processes in a world filled with less than perfect information and data integrity challenges. Working together with key members of both the WPS and ES Divisions, the team began the task of assimilating data and insights required to develop Nalco’s planning capabilities and achieve significant financial performance improvements. All of this effort faced a headwind of increasing market dynamics amplified by the global economic downturn.

Addressing the Challenges
The joint Nalco-Digital Tempus team first developed a comprehensive understanding of both the business landscape in terms of existing planning hierarchies and at the same time, processes used to formulate a picture of demand for the various parts of the organization. Both WPS and ES Divisions comprise a number of Strategic Business Units (SBUs), each focused on specific market segments. WPS Division’s major segments include Pulp and Paper, Institutional, Manufacturing, Power, Chemical, Food & Beverage, Primary Metals and Mining. Energy Services units major on supplying innovative and mainstream materials and blends to all aspects of the global energy sector – servicing from natural gas and oil recovery to downstream refining and chemical processes.

While the two business units serve different markets, both share a common need to manage demand volatility and provide accurate forecasts at multiple levels of the business, which in Nalco’s case becomes strata based on manufacturing identification numbers, products, plants, and locations, and a variety of business attributes that detail transactional history stored in the company’s enterprise systems, including SAP and legacy applications.

Digital Tempus’ expertise in extracting the most pertinent data from enterprise systems, in conjunction with a unique ability to develop world-class planning practices has established a new planning capability for Nalco that addresses demand and supply perspectives of the business. According to Albert F. Beninati, Nalco Integrated Business Management Leader, "Nalco has plenty of experience attempting to get this process off the ground, and over the years we’ve learned that keeping the business leadership and commercial teams engaged is key. Digital Tempus’ ability to communicate with various stakeholders and derive insights from our data was critical to achieving our objectives."

A Fact-Based Approach
Process consulting and transformation is only part of the story; Nalco has also benefited from the use of Digital Tempus’ Business Intelligence Services. Every month, Nalco synchronizes vast amounts of data with Digital Tempus in a service configured and managed specifically for Nalco, where predictive and other analytical models are run to produce insights for Nalco’s team. The process is delivering meaningful forecasts and insights that are reviewed by SBU leaders and Marketing to develop a comprehensive plan for the business. The resulting plan is further attributed to provide the Supply team with a segmented view of products and geographies to steer distribution, manufacturing, and purchasing decisions in a model focused on enhancing cash flow, delivering increased service to customers, and supporting growth strategies in core segments of the business.

The Results
In the North American domestic market, where the process of Nalco Integrated Business Management re-alignment began, the results achieved have been dramatic and rapidly attained. In less than seven months, from initial discovery and engagement, Digital Tempus helped Nalco deploy enhanced planning capabilities across all SBUs in both divisions and succeed in its stated aims of connecting supply chain with business operations and revamping inventory management. As a result, in the 2009 Annual Report, Fyrwald noted that, "Through a new integrated business management approach, combined with improved Sales and Operations Planning processes, we began to reduce inventories meaningfully, taking 15 days out of Days Investment in Inventory in 2009 alone."

Throughout the process, Nalco has gained significant insight into the demand drivers influencing demand patterns in WPS and ES markets and now has the ability to integrate the planning results with operational decisions throughout the business in line with the goals of Fyrwald’s statement, ensuring a more focused approach to maximizing the company’s many assets by establishing a world-class planning capability that enables the company to operate at peak levels of performance.