CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

18 September 2007

Implementation Investments

First Milk Chooses IFS Applications to Help Streamline Its Supply Chain

IFS announced that Britain's largest UK- farmer-owned business First Milk, has selected IFS Applications to provide full integration of all critical business processes and optimize production across its cheese division sites nationwide. In a deal worth US $3million, IFS Applications will be deployed in the eight creameries and packing plants over nine months.

IFS Applications will integrate First Milk's formerly disjointed business systems and processes, including warehouse management, financials, forecasting and payroll, enabling centralized control of operations and providing a new level of visibility across the entire enterprise and supply chain. Real-time reporting on cheese production, maturation, packaging and dispatch will also enable First Milk to respond with much greater agility to inevitable variations in milk supply and customer demand-ensuring business performance is consistently at an optimal level.

According to First Milk's Group Head of IT Alan Hutchison, IFS was chosen over other ERP providers such as SAP because its solution delivers seamless integration, is easy to use and quick to implement, and demonstrated unmatched functionality during the selection process. In addition, Hutchison said that IFS Applications is best able to handle the challenges of the cheese supply chain, especially product lifecycle management. "The central challenge of cheese production is accurately forecasting demand 18 months out from actual delivery to customers, matching this with supply from farmers, and keeping track of the different maturation levels of thousands of tonnes of cheese. In First Milk's case this challenge is even greater because most of our customers are major supermarkets, which only provide one day's notice for orders. The ability of IFS Applications to handle the company's long-term and short-term production planning requirements within one system was a key reason behind our decision to implement it," said Hutchison.

Commenting on plans for the future, Hutchison said, "The plan is to roll out IFS Applications across our milk operations and ingredients divisions as well."

Paul Massey, Managing Director of IFS UK, said, "As the UK's largest dairy farmer co-operative, First Milk's decision to implement IFS Applications in its cheese division is a powerful endorsement of the solution, and represents a major step in our continued growth in the food industry. We look forward to working with First Milk, assisting it with the ongoing streamlining and integration of its operations, and helping it to continue providing high quality cheese to supermarkets and other retailers around the UK."

The process industry is one of IFS' seven targeted markets. IFS provides industry-specific functionality for enterprises in food and beverage, chemicals, pulp and paper, and metals segments. IFS Applications for the food & beverage industry provides support for all critical business processes, including batch balancing, recipe management, quality management, and demand planning supporting domain specific needs like multiple units of measure and catch weight. The application suite includes a complete asset as well as product lifecycle management solution. IFS customers in the food & beverage industry include Pepsi, Iams, V&S Absolut Spirits, Heaven Hill Distilleries Inc, Cloetta-Fazer and Kettle Foods. Other IFS process industry customers include DuPont, Jotun, SICPA, XSYS Print Solutions, Willamette Valley Company, Akzo Nobel, Becker Industrial Coatings, SSAB, Hutmen, Stora Enso, Holmen Paper and SCA Graphics.

About First Milk

First Milk is the largest dairy farmer co-operative in the UK. Its members' farms stretch from Central Scotland to the South of England and from West Wales to East Anglia. The business has three divisions: Milk Operations; Cheese; and Ingredients.

Milk Operations handles approximately two billion litres of milk per annum from around 2800 producers. This milk is supplied to First Milk's cheese business and to many of the leading names in the industry. First Milk Cheese Company is the largest UK-based cheese supplier.

First Milk's Ingredients business supplies a range of customers with milk powder and whey products for functional foods, protein drinks, pro-biotics, pre-biotics, pharmaceutical, bakery and confectionary products.

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