Dole Food & Beverages Group, a division of The Dole Sunshine Company, is a world leader in growing, sourcing, distributing, and marketing fruit and healthy snacks. The company sells packaged, shelf-stable fruit, frozen fruit, dried fruit and juices to customers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Dole operates manufacturing facilities around the world, with factories in the Philippines, Thailand and the US, as well as a global 3PM network.
Success Story
Dole Food & Beverage Group
Demand planning, Supply planning, Factory planning, Sales and operations planning, Data access services
Dole Food & Beverage Group transforms its supply chain planning and visibility with remarkable results
Das Unternehmen
Die geschäftliche Herausforderung
Dole has been a Blue Yonder customer since 2002, with multiple planning solutions. Recently Dole partnered with Blue Yonder to transform its supply chain capabilities across its end-to-end network and add leading-edge visualization, along with data analytics, for insights that enable optimal decision-making.
Die Lösung
Multiple solutions were rolled out remotely, across different time zones, with challenging timelines. Dole successfully launched demand planning, supply planning, sales and operations planning and data access services in 2022. Today more than 150 Dole employees leverage these solutions, which span the company’s Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Operations and Markets teams.
“Our multiple Blue Yonder solutions support end-to-end, integrated planning with a centralized view of information, shared access to data analytics, and near real-time decision support. We not only have complete visualization of the supply chain, for improved disruption management, but we can also make data driven decisions and minimize risk. That’s led to a range of benefits that include lower costs, higher service and increased productivity.”
–Dinesh Vyas, Senior Director, Supply Chain Solutions
Dole’s sweeping transformation drives fill rate, inventory improvements
To drive a comprehensive transformation, Dole needed to enable agile, responsive cross-functional supply chain processes that empower people with data-driven decision making capabilities, leveraging an end-to-end, integrated technology platform.
“The combination of processes, people and technology was critical to our success,” says Siddharth Ramaswamy, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Dole. “Blue Yonder’s planning solutions emerged as the perfect fit, enabling us to make faster business decisions, enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs and optimize planner time.”
The results of the transformation include fill rates that are above 95%, as well as a 40% inventory reduction in just 18 months.
“Due to supply chain disruptions caused by COVID-19 and ocean shipping issues, our fill rates saw a substantial decline, while inventory levels increased due to market demand fluctuations,” notes Anuj Shrimal, VP, Global Supply Chain Planning and Solutions. “However, through the adoption of Blue Yonder solutions, we successfully enhanced demand forecast accuracy across our primary markets. That led to a dramatic improvement of fill rates, while significantly reducing inventory levels. For manufacturers, inventory represents cash sitting idle, without earning any interest — hindering the company’s ability to invest in growth. Decreasing inventory value, especially as interest rates were rising, had a substantial positive impact on net income.”
A key moment of discovery for Dole was recognizing that traditional planning solutions and cadences aren’t sufficient to address today’s new level of demand and supply volatility. Blue Yonder’s cloud-native software helps Dole plan weekly, on a more dynamic basis, fed by near real-time data — for better visibility and responsiveness to changes. It’s dramatically improved Dole’s planning results and the productivity of its team.
In addition, Blue Yonder helped Dole transform its reporting process, so the supply chain team can accurately measure and improve its results. By implementing Data Access Services, Dole can not only make fact-based decisions, but it’s also built a comprehensive analytical framework for the supply chain that includes KPIs, exceptions, dashboards and reports.
“Blue Yonder has been our strategic supply chain partner for over 20 years. When we decided to embark on a digital transformation, we conducted a very methodical and structured process to evaluate different technology providers. We chose to partner with Blue Yonder based on its proven supply chain capabilities, ability to provide mature solutions across the supply chain, and our trust in Blue Yonder based on our long and successful relationship.”
–Dinesh Vyas, Senior Director, Supply Chain Solutions
