Here are some pain points many producers no doubt relate to:

  • Traditional stat models run on history, which isn’t a great predictor of spirits and beverage sales in the current environment.
  • Complex distribution plans change with every run, with planners struggling to locate the biggest risks.
  • Bottling is based on the best guess of demand, sometimes without reference to the demand plan.
  • Lots of attention is paid to bottle and can orders, almost entirely outside of the planning systems.

So, do you need to start over? Absolutely not. Those systems still provide a baseline for and link to financials. And no one wants to endure the pain of re-implementing them. But these systems must be augmented with a supply chain, artificial intelligence (AI) “digital twin” that predicts detailed behaviors of your supply chain and provides recommended actions to address risk.

 

Planning and operating supply chains with Flow Operations (FlowOps).

Noodle.ai has developed proprietary AI capabilities that go far beyond any traditional AI toolkit to address the difficult challenges of planning and operating supply chains. In fact, we were granted our patent for AI inventory planning in 2021. We call our technology Flow Operations, or FlowOps for short.

Our supply chain applications for FlowOps provide deeply needed capabilities for planners and are well-suited to the challenges of spirits and beverages businesses. They can help you to:

 

1. Lock onto mix at the DC level

The Noodle.ai Demand Flow AI application provides unique capabilities to predict demand at all levels of hierarchy, using diverse inputs (including, importantly, human ones):

  • Our advanced neural networks run 100x faster and look at more relationships.
  • Our unique AI engine evaluates which inputs are trustworthy. There may be sales forecasts that are a gold mine of insight—and others, not so much.
  • You can run predictions at all levels across multiple hierarchies with our AI engine, which ensures quality at every level.

2. Get finished products into the right DC (Inventory Flow)

The Noodle.ai Inventory Flow application predicts demand and supply and provides recommended actions at the granularity needed to navigate the execution horizon (next ~13 weeks). The app:

  • Predicts both demand and supply. (Yes, your production plan has a bunch of orders that won’t be built on the dates recorded.)
  • Predicts probabilistic financial risk for every SKU/DC (effectively, millions of Monte Carlos).
  • Recommends tangible actions that your planners can review and/or that you can directly incorporate into your enterprise resource planning (ERP) process.

3. Fill the right mix of sizes (Production Flow)

The Noodle.ai Production Flow application synchronizes production with sales, stabilizing production with fewer changes. It can:

  • Link production decisions with probabilistic AI simulation of the distribution network and demand.
  • Predict financial risk and the amount mitigated by recommendation action to control short-term production changes.

4. Stabilize the order flow for bottles and cans (Material Flow –Beta Release)

The Material Flow app, now in beta release, lets you directly predict key materials without the noise and information loss of a traditional planning system. The app:

  • Enables prediction of materials across current, planned, and future products.
  • Allows incorporation of numerous data feeds not considered by ERP and advanced planning and scheduling (APS) engines.

 

Let’s talk.

Noodle.ai is already helping some of the biggest producers in the spirits and beverages sector to use the combined power of human and machine intelligence to make better decisions.

If you’re curious about FlowOps and want to find out how we can get you started with using our technology, don’t hesitate to contact our experts or request a demo. We also have a resource center to help producers learn more about FlowOps. You can check it out here.

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