Berlin / DE. (fico) Harry Brot GmbH, Germany’s largest producer of baked goods, has won a «Fico Decisions Award» for its use of advanced optimization technology to reduce costs. Harry-Brot produces roughly 1’000 varieties of baked goods that are distributed to 9’300 German stores. The baker runs 73 different production lines across nine sites; each production line is restricted to a specific set of products, speed of production, and capacity. «Fico» is the shortcut for Fair Isaac Corporation, headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. Its subsidiary Fair Isaac Germany GmbH is based in Bensheim and has a branch office in Berlin.
«We wanted to find the optimal assignment of products to different production lines; we were eager to see, if we changed the status quo, how much cost savings we could uncover and still meet our customer’s demands», said Matthias Säger, Project Manager Logistics Systems, Harry-Brot. «With «Fico’s» powerful optimization, we were amazed at what we found and how quickly we were able to go from insight to action. We could analyse a large set of variables, modify constraints and explore trade-offs in order to identify the optimal strategy for baking production and distribution. The scenario output gave us tremendous insight into more profitable decisions and the impact of different combinations of factors».
Using «Fico Xpress Optimization» and working with «Asolvo», a German firm specializing in optimization services, the baker was able to dramatically improve the efficiency of its highly complex baking production and distribution operations.
With «Fico Xpress Insight», Harry-Brot was able to apply high-performance solvers and algorithms, flexible modelling, comparative scenario analysis and visualization to identify ideal assignments for production lines. This helped minimize costs and meet customer demand; in fact, Harry-Brot saw cost reductions of 3.57 percent and 1.81 percent for production and transportation costs, respectively. Overall costs were reduced by 3.4 percent, which meant that cost savings achieved in the first year significantly surpassed the company’s investment.
«Harry-Brot is a great example of the real power of optimization; solving complex business problems by running comparative scenarios that show where you are today, and identifying the potential opportunities that exist in the future», said Bill Waid, vice president for «Fico» Decision Management Suite.
«I’m very impressed with Harry-Brot’s application of optimization to solve a highly complex sourcing problem», said Douglas Gray, director of Enterprise Data + Analytics at Southwest Airlines, which won a 2016 «Fico» Decisions Award; Gray was a judge for this year’s awards. «Though baking is a very different business from airlines, their experience using «Fico Xpress Optimization» echoes our own, and like Southwest they have taken full advantage of the power and flexibility of a tool that can crunch astronomical amounts of data and weigh millions of alternate solutions to find the very best».
«Fico Xpress Optimization» is the world’s most advanced optimization software, enabling businesses to quickly and easily apply optimization techniques to solve business problems, faster. «Fico Xpress» is part of the «Fico Decision Management Suite», a platform for building and managing analytics-powered decision management applications.
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