Consumer Products
Yuhan Kimberly
Business Environment
Yuhan-Kimberly is a global household goods company and a joint venture between Kimberly Clark Corporation in the US and Yuhan Corporation in South Korea. The company specializes in household hygiene products and bath/body care and offers a wide range of globally recognized products such as the Huggies baby diaper brand and the Kleenex toilet paper brand. The company is committed to providing high-quality and innovative products that are designed to meet the needs of consumers around the world. With a strong focus on sustainability and environmental responsibility, Yuhan-Kimberly continues to grow as a leading player in the household goods industry.
Project Background & Goals
Yuhan-Kimberly previously faced operational inefficiencies due to their manual demand forecasting and sales planning process, which was done using Excel. Without standardization, demand forecasts were inconsistent and sales plans were formulated manually. Additionally, the production plans that were developed were not feasible, leading to a significant amount of time and effort spent by the planning department reconstructing necessary information and difficulties in communication among related departments. In an effort to improve these issues, Yuhan-Kimberly established improvement goals for the main areas of their Supply Chain Management (SCM) process. Specifically, in marketing, they aimed to create monthly forecasts of Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) national level data. In the sales department, they aimed to improve the integration of quantity switching and distribution by entering weekly forecasts and amounts of selected products. The SCM department aimed to analyze forecast and planning information on prices and quantities to implement a systematic Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) conferencing system. Lastly, for management, the company sought to improve the quality of forecasting and configured a monitoring system that allowed for various searches by SCM area.
Return on Investments
To improve operational inefficiencies caused by manual demand forecasting and sales planning using Excel, Yuhan-Kimberly set goals to improve its supply chain management (SCM) processes. By implementing a system that applies various demand forecast models based on statistics and machine learning, Yuhan-Kimberly was able to quickly obtain accurate forecast values at individual SKU level. By providing the sales department with real-time sales status, it improved the accuracy of demand forecasting. Additionally, by incorporating aggregation and disaggregation features, the quality of forecasts has been improved, allowing for better collaboration between upper and lower level units. The system also allows for monthly and weekly sales planning to be managed in one place, and for comparison between the plan and actual results, as well as access to various necessary data for planning.
