Better planning gives Church & Dwight competitive edge

Chain Drug Review, April 20, 2009

PRINCETON, N.J. -- In the current economic climate Church & Dwight Co. executives turn to efficient and effective planning processes to deliver value across the company's portfolio of some of the industry's most iconic brands.

Operating in categories where it goes head-to-head with such personal care and household products giants as Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble Co. requires a different approach, in order to drive growth in the business, and a key area of focus has been to improve the capability for planning--figuring out what customers need before they need it.

Executives knew that to grow Church & Dwight's business, a streamlined process and automation would be required to predict customer demand accurately several months in advance. "Our approach to customer planning is a critical component of our growth platform," notes senior director of supply chain services Sam Dragotta.

Church & Dwight's use of planning and forecasting capabilities, Dragotta explains, goes back nearly six years, when executives saw the need to address a people-intense planning process and implement systems to automate the process, streamline the company's operations and make the company more competitive.

"We knew we needed a new approach, but we didn't have the expertise in-house," he recalls. "We focused on implementing a system while at the same time we shifted responsibility for analysis and planning from sales to operations, in order to drive additional detail and discipline in the process."

After the initial implementation of a planning system provided mixed results, Church & Dwight's operations department realized that a balance of information from various sources needed to be gathered to provide guidance to the automated forecasting approach.

In order to develop a consensus forecast, the company employed a sales and operations planning process for its major brands to gather market intelligence from sales and marketing.

The market intelligence, coupled with a statistical forecast, allowed the demand planning group to provide supply planning with a realistic picture of customer demand.

Even with this change in process, "we were getting about 72% accuracy at the customer level at that time, and we needed to do better," Dragotta recalls.

The company decided to bring in the specialized consulting firm Digital Tempus Inc. to revamp its planning and forecasting capabilities and achieve new levels of performance.

Digital Tempus was able to Increase the accuracy of Church & Dwight's forecast to near 85% at customer level, leveraging and improving upon then existing implementations of JDA Software, SAP and Siebel.

Dragotta says the enhanced process provides planners greater insight into the trends that would affect the business over the next 18 months. And besides creating a more effective planning process, he adds, Digital Tempus tuned established systems to respond to changing business patterns.

"With president and chief executive officer James Craigie setting such planning metrics as forecast accuracy as a critical success driver, the entire company has become invested in the effort," Dragotta points out.