Real Pet Food Company Operation Handbook

The Real Pet Food Company (RPFC) was born in 2015. Over the next two years seven acquisitions were made including Nature’s Gift, Tucker Time, Dr B’s BARF, Billy + Margot, Ivory Coat, CME Factory at Inverell and the Jimbo’s business in New Zealand.

Along with the acquisitions, the Company has grown through hard work and determination. They have launched new brands, such as Farmers Market, and are now represented in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US. They have 9 manufacturing facilities across the Globe producing all formats of pet food and remain the largest Chilled/Fresh pet food manufacturer.

The challenge

RPFC waste over a million dollars p.a. on pet food that expires. One of the underlying reasons for the waste is a lack of real time information about the core operations of the business and the distribution of products to customers throughout Australia. Because RPFC produce perishable goods, the supply, manufacturing and distribution process must all be synchronised if goods are to arrive at the customers on time, without expiring.

The Solution

Seisma created a solution called the “Operations Playbook”, which integrates data from a variety of sources and presents a series of interactive dashboards.  The dashboards provide the Operations and Sales teams as well as the Executive with greater transparency into the way that the manufacturing and distribution process is planned and managed.

Data engineers and data scientists from Seisma worked together with experts from the Operations, Sales and Inventory teams at the RPFC to produce the insights into how the planning process can be better planned and managed.  Extra information regarding sales and inventory were added to the solution to provide a 360 degree view of the performance of the operations group and the individual manufacturing and warehouse sites around Australia.  

Highlights

• Empowering users to interactively look at their own data to provide insights into the performance of the operations group and help reduce annualised waste in lost revenue
• Isolating products with low coverage against current production and forecasts
• Comparing the actual vs budget and stock levels for sites across Australia for any period
• Pinpointing differences in sales and inventory in this period vs the same period from last year or any other period
• Identifying overdue work orders for any given production site across Australia

^{*This case study is sourced from acquired company Data Addiction.}