StarKist cuts planning time by 94% with Board, powered by Microsoft Azure

Established in 1917, StarKist is a well-known food brand in the United States that provides healthy, sustainable, and shelf-stable seafood and chicken products. Considered an industry innovator, StarKist was the first brand to introduce the now-popular single-serve pouch. It has three production facilities, in American Samoa, Ecuador, and Senegal, as well as five major U.S. distribution centers.

Manually tracking figures, accounts, and SKUs derailed planning, analysis, and outcomes

Before StarKist began its transformation journey, all demand and production planning data was entered and managed manually with spreadsheets. Aggregating and allocating units was error-prone and cumbersome, and the process couldn’t provide real-time figures for supply and demand planning functions.

Other challenges included:

• Lengthy delays: Financial forecasting spreadsheets took days to complete and were often fraught with errors caused by dealing with new SKUs, discontinued SKUs, and customer allocations.
• Fewer insights: Significant analysis of SKU traffic, such as digging deeper into the forecasts to determine delivery differences, was unachievable.
• Cumbersome data: The StarKist supply chain department’s reliance on an SAP ERP for production planning resulted in a huge amount of data accumulating in a complex spreadsheet that became too difficult to maintain.

Board seamlessly links supply and demand planning with finance

StarKist used the Board Intelligent Planning Platform, hosted on Microsoft Azure, to effectively unite production and demand processes with finance, through a single system and source of truth.

StarKist’s key requirements for the project included:

• A complete replacement of the spreadsheet-based planning system with Board’s cloud-based platform to perform all aggregations and allocations while eliminating manual data entry.
• Migration of supply chain operations onto the same Board solution, giving access to the same data as demand planning, and providing a shared single point of truth.
• The ability to build reports such as forecast accuracy and create scorecards and KPIs that include all financial variables.

StarKist benefits from Board’s seamless integration with Azure Machine Learning, which provides access to more than 40 bundled algorithms and the ability to run securely at cloud case.

Nelson Petracek, CTO of Board International, said, “Microsoft’s global datacenters control and manage customer data with the experience gained from over two decades of keeping data safe, maintaining privacy, and meeting compliance requirements. This is a critical consideration for customers like StarKist.”

StarKist achieved a 94% reduction in planning time through increased agility and collaboration

Board removed StarKist’s reliance on spreadsheets, increasing efficiency and improving reaction time to volatile market conditions by reducing the planning cycle from 16 hours to less than one.

The Board-based supply and demand planning solution empowered StarKist to plan for and respond to disruption faster as well as:

• Increase transparency and collaboration: Moving to one shared Board solution streamlined data flows to create a single, consolidated view of StarKist’s data.
• Boost operational security and efficiency: Aggregations and forecasting processes are now automated in one secure, cloud-based platform.
• Seamlessly integrate supply chain management: Board’s supply and demand solution works seamlessly with the broader supply chain planning process.
• Make reliable decisions: The combination of intelligent planning and consistent forecast accuracy reports enables project variables to be used to effectively define benchmarks and goals.
• Take ownership of reports: Board’s flexibility, scalability, and no-code nature empowered StarKist’s internal stakeholders to become experts in utilizing data to customize their reports and dashboards to suit evolving requirements.

Ted Wong, Director Trade Marketing at StarKist, said, “Board helped us overhaul our demand and supply chain planning processes, leading to a more accurate, responsive, and profitable framework.”