Balton Trading Asia: now we can make faster and better forecasts

Balton Trading Asia is a leader in FMCG – the first national distributor with 25 years of proven experience in import and distribution of consumer goods in Uzbekistan. The company operates in 10 regions, the assortment has more than 2,000 items, much of which has a limited shelf life. At the same time, Balton cooperates with a large number of partners, each of which is unique. In such circumstances effective planning and timely reaction to changes become a necessary component of successful business. Balton Trading Asia decided to invest in the planning process automation.

The first phase of the project was to automate the sales planning and forecasting block based on the cloud-based integrated planning platform Anaplan. The following feature set was developed:

• A window for analyzing sales history and its automatic clearing,
• Forecasts building of building blocks,
• Planning innovations and assortment expansions taking into account the active customer base and benchmarks,
• Calculating and adjusting sales plans based on prioritization of shipments under inventory constraints,
• Reporting block, which allows to track the sales dynamics within the month, as well as the forecast compliance to the company’s annual objectives,
• A block for identifying and controlling the risks of limited inventory and short shelf life,
• Integration of the planning system with ERP to automate reporting based on the special app for Anaplan Booster

• Thereafter, we expect to cut the forecast preparation time by half while improving the details.
• Automation of transactional functions and reporting to control plan fulfillment, annual objective and inventory availability has saved the team’s time to analyze the situation and make more informed management decisions.
• The features to calculate and monitor potential inventory delinquency allowed optimizing the work with products with limited shelf life, identifying potential write-off risks at an early stage.
• Identification of additional opportunities to optimize the current demand planning process.