FDBusiness.com

Barloworld Supply Chain Software (Barloworld SCS) celebrated some of its top software users of 2012 including BAT, Carlsberg, DHL, LEGO Group & Automotive Distributors Ltd, with an awards ceremony at its annual User Forum event

This year’s User Forum took place on the 17th October at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull, UK and was attended by 130 Barloworld SCS software users from all over the world, which included major retailers, food and drink manufacturers and logistics operations.

The annual event enables Barloworld SCS customers to see the current products and learn about future planned developments. It is also an opportunity to network with industry colleagues and meet the Barloworld SCS sales and development teams.

“We use the Barloworld SCS user forum as a chance to talk openly to our customers and get valuable feedback about our products” says Kevin Boake, Managing Director of Barloworld SCS. “It also enables us to recognise and thank some of our customers, which we do through our ‘User of the Year’ awards.”

The ‘User of the Year’ titles are awarded to Barloworld SCS customers, based on how their use of Barloworld SCS software has benefitted their operations. Kevin Boake, announced the ‘OPTIMIZA User of the Year 2012’ as Automotive Distributors Ltd and presented the award to Tracy Leggett.

Due to a high level of nominations, this year’s ‘CAST Aurora User of the Year’ award was divided into five categories and the awards were presented by Fraser Ironside, Head of Strategic Modelling at Barloworld SCS. The Global Region ‘CAST Aurora User of the Year 2012’ award was presented to Yannick Picaut of British American Tobacco. Peter Madsen of Carlsberg was awarded the European Region category title and the Asia Region award was presented to Girts Jaunpujens of the LEGO Group.

DHL received two ‘CAST Aurora User of the Year 2012’ awards. Paul Forrest received the 3PL category title and Fielden Sinei was awarded the African Region title. New OPTIMIZA software functionality was shared with the attendees, which includes a new flexi template, Multi-Demand stream and Price Break Optimisation functionality.

“We showed our users how we are able to audit and track changes to inventory data over time, enabling them to better understand the root cause of problems and when they have occurred, particularly with the Flexi template functionality.” says Kevin Boake.

OPTIMIZA users also learnt about Oriana software, built from the standard Barloworld SCS technology on the foundation of Microsoft .NET and SQL Server.

“We successfully demonstrated all the existing functionally that has been brought across from OPTIMIZA” adds Kevin. “We showed how the tools now also include fully integrated Hierarchical demand forecasting and S&OP functionality, such as diary systems, process monitoring, reasoning coding and audit logging.”

Customers also learnt about the new functionality of CAST Aurora.

“CAST Aurora is already helping companies to realise great levels of supply chain savings using the software’s multi-time period optimisation function, which was revealed at the 2011 User Forum” says Fraser Ironside.

“That functionality shows which assets to open and close and when to make investment decisions, whilst considering real world constraints such as facility contract length and opening and closing costs.”

New CAST functionality includes a Transaction Level Data Importer and Aggregation Wizard, SKU level inventory modelling across the network, Next generation Carbon Modelling and Optimisation and Multi-Objective Network Optimisation scenarios. Barloworld SCS staff also offered product training at the event and attendees were invited to run real time models in CAST Aurora, under the guidance of a Barloworld SCS consultant.

“The CAST User Forum provided an ideal opportunity for our customers to get hands-on experience with the new CAST Aurora software functionality and to help us to shape the future development of the product” adds Fraser.

Barloworld Supply Chain Software is a leading global supply chain planning company, providing expertise, tools and solutions to help companies optimise their network and inventory performance.