LiDestri sharpens planning, saves millions with Oracle Cloud
The food and beverage producer is reducing waste and inventory costs, thanks to Oracle Cloud supply chain planning applications.
“With Oracle Cloud Demand Management, we’ve been able to reduce our inventory through increased visibility and better forecast accuracy.”
Business challenges
Based in Rochester, New York, LiDestri Food and Drink is a family-owned company with plants across the US that supply sauces, beverages, and spirits to major consumer brands, including Newman’s Own, Francesco Rinaldi, and Wegmans supermarkets.
After decades of using Excel sheets and guesswork to forecast demand, which usually begins 12 to 18 months before it ships a product, LiDestri realized it needed clearer views into its supply chain.
With 1,000 different products rolling off 24 production lines, LiDestri needs the right ingredients for sauces, dips, and other goods at just the right time, which requires close collaboration with food growers. The answer was better visibility and more accurate intelligence.
LiDestri also sought better tools to help customers order in the right volumes, which would help the company save money by lowering inventory.
By having accurate forecasts, we’ve been able to reduce disposals by more than 50%, saving millions of dollars a year.
Why LiDestri Chose Oracle
LiDestri had used on-premises Oracle software for many years, so when the company decided to move demand management to the cloud, Oracle was the natural choice to be the backbone of its supply chain and manufacturing processes.
Moving to Oracle cloud-based systems supported LiDestri’s top supply chain strategies: to innovate, manage expenses, and maintain superior customer service.
The Oracle Cloud SCM application suite offered a unified source of data, which improves LiDestri’s ability to work with its growers on forecasts.
“Being a food producer, we have to provide traceability from where that ingredient came in from the field, to when it came into our plant to what jar we put it in,” says CIO John Matrachisia.
“Our disposals were higher than we felt they should be for reasons like not having all the ingredients ready at the time of production or producing items with inputs that had gone past their shelf life and we’d have to throw these items out,” Matrachisia says. “All that adds up to a very costly impact on the business.”
Meantime, the Oracle Cloud SCM applications promised to help LiDestri lower inventory through accurate customer ordering, another area where better data makes a big difference.
Results
In just three months, LiDestri migrated to Oracle Cloud SCM applications, improving supply chain visibility and inventory management.
In the first year, those improvements contributed to a significant savings for LiDestri by reducing food disposals, a major achievement for a company that receives up to 10 train carloads of tomatoes daily at single facilities.
Refining its supply chain also has helped LiDestri maintain its 40-year streak of zero product recalls.
Additionally, improved forecasting tools helped cut inventory costs by 5% to 10%. Using the intelligence built into Oracle Cloud Demand Management, LiDestri created a two-year historical analysis to show customers how much product the company really need.
For years, Lidestri accepted customer forecasts and used hunches to adjust them—its team lacked the data to confirm or deny projections. Now, Oracle Cloud Demand Management generates data that LiDestri shares with customers, so they can order with greater accuracy, which helps LiDestri lower its cost of inventory.