Having started at the beginning of this year, the project for developing a new method of integrated job order planning of sales, production and shipments in the Ilim Group (a part of International Paper) has passed a significant milestone — development of the Concept of integrated planning and target processes has been completed. As part of this phase, the logic of interaction of all the services involved was worked out in detail, requirements for planning methods and criteria, business rules and target information systems were formed by customer in collaboration with the Enterchain consultants. The project covers Ilim headquarters and three production sites in Koryazhma, Bratsk and Ust-Ilimsk.
When developing target processes, emphasis was put on the best world practices, the commonality philosophy, taking into account the local key features of the company as a whole and its individual production branches. The designed processes and guidelines are focused on high, but realistic standards for planning of sales, production and shipments, they form the basis for objective and comprehensive requirements for the development of IT tools that support company’s integrated planning.
The next phases of this large-scale project will be the elaboration of KPI system, the analysis of expected economic effects, the formation of an IT architecture and a roadmap for the development of business systems.
“Any work in the field of supply chain management is cross-functional and therefore organizationally and politically challenging,” Anton Shmatalyuk, Enterchain Managing Director, commented on the completion of the project phase. “Optimization of the entire production and logistics chain affects the work and interests of all company services — from production and logistics to sales, customer service, procurement and the financial and economic unit. This project was no exception — from the very beginning we were ready for complex discussions, decisions uneasy to approve and search for a debatable truth. This is a natural process that we have worthily gone through along with the customer, having obtained very significant and comprehensive results — from a general increase in the level of knowledge and employees involvement in problematics, to a high-quality and detailed study of the target processes and the requirements for their context. This result has already launched a number of internal initiatives to adjust operational processes and refine information systems aimed at fast achieving local improvements in accordance with the general Concept of integrated planning. The new ‘background’ is already helping Ilim Group managers and experts implement better and more systemic solutions in the ‘sales-production-supply chain’.”
