Celebrating Customer Success Stories

On September 26^th 2024, we hosted our customer event, called Excitement Session at O’Douce in Nazareth, Belgium. In this fantastic décor, we were honored to welcome our customers for a full day of networking and experience sharing. The event featured several inspiring cases from our customers, along with informative presentations on our in-house solutions. In between sessions, there was plenty of time for refreshments, self-made smoothies and catch up.

Celebrating and learning from customer successes

Throughout the day, several of our customers took to the stage to present which stepstheir taking to achieve their supply chain goals together with Solventure.

First up was Hendrik Decock, Operations Director at Destrooper Biscuits, who shared his learnings from using ‘Solventure Perform’ together with Nick Verstraete, CTO at Solventure. They discussed the current challenges FMCG manufacturing companies face, how these effect the complexity of Destrooper’s portfolio, and how Solventure Perform helped Destrooper to build a winning portfolio and reach a whopping 3.3% EBITDA improvement on its branded business during the last 3 months.

The second customer joining us on stage was DYKA Group, part of Tessenderlo Group, represented by Martin Joyce, Group Sales & Operations Planning Manager, and Ralf-Geert Osborne, Business Transformation Manager, who shared many lessons-learned from their recent ‘Project One Plan’ implementation track. Following a short introduction on the plastic pipe manufacturer, Martin and Ralf Geert explained why they chose Kinaxis as their supply chain planning tool and Solventure as its implementation partner. Walking us through their new implementation process, the two presenters discussed everything they had learned, from their agile way of working, to leveraging best-practices and their focus on change management to keep their project team enthusiastic and engaged from start to finish.

Up next were Daphni van Doorne, Supply Chain Director, and Lucio Martin, Strategic Planning & S&OP Director, from Ontex, who updated us on their first learnings from the ongoing high-level design project. The manufacturer of personal hygiene products has been working with Solventure since 2017, and as a result of recent organizational changes is redefine their supply chain architecture and processes. Risk-optimized planning and qualitative aspects such as boosting team dynamics, adding benchmarking and organizing more effective S&OE and S&OP meeting are the main goals of this design project. More on Ontex’s journey will be shared later on, so be sure to keep a lookout!

And finally, we were delighted to invite Joris Blondé, Gobal IT Head Supply chain, to the podium to give us some insights into two of the current transformation projects at the steel manufacturer Bekaert. The key lessons Joris shared on this project were: speed is important – but quality evenly so. It’s crucial to let the end-users describe planning problems to solve; to manage your global context well; take enough time for master data management; and to never lose sight of change (and people) management throughout the project. Joris highlighted the need for extensive training, including stakeholders of supply chain in the process and selling the added value of the project repeatedly.

Highlighting differentiators

In between the customer success stories, there was also room for more informative sessions on the strenghts of Solventure: its supply chain tools, frameworks and people.

Kilian Vincke, Customer Engagement Director at Solventure, gave a round-up of Arkieva news, while looking forward to the phased approach of the cloud solution by the APS tooling software company. Kilian also headed the info session on Solventure’s customer engagement framework, putting customer centricity at the heart of its value proposition. In a similar fashion, Tom Vorsselmans, Project Manager Data Integration at Solventure, gave a session on how to improve data quality & monitoring for manufacturing companies. During his presentation, Tom also focused on Solventure’s data integration offering,  Solventure Connect  highlighting our data scan approach and data quality monitoring.

But this Excitement Session wasn’t only meant to give information to the audience, it also had a lot of opportunities to gather feedback from them. Just before lunch, Bram took a moment to ask the participants what they think makes Solventure different, as well as what we should keep, stop and start doing in the future. Let’s say the response was overwhelmingly positive, with customers appreciating our customer intimacy, open vision, supply chain expertise and hands-on approach, to name a few. Going forward, our customers would like us to focus even more on our proactive project management approach, the impact of AI and supporting knowledge lower in customer organizations.

I want to more actively challenge our customers and prospects that the right things are being done to drive sustainable change and value through S&OP, and that a holistic perspective of people-process-tools-analytics is taken.

Bram Desmet - CEO Solventure

In-depth panel debate to close out the day

What better than an interactive panel discussion to bring together all the supply chain expertise present at the Excitement Session? In a fitting closing session for the event, Nick Verstraete, CTO of Solventure, moderated a dynamic discussion on how to break through the company's silos and engage in a more cross-functional planning collaboration. The panelists on stage were Gaetano Nasto, S&OP & Supply Planning Manager at Perfetti van Melle, Lucio Martin from Ontex, Heidi Vanderswalmen, Director of Supply at Wonderful Brands, and Jan van Rooden, self-employed Supply Chain Professional.

In the following, sometimes heated, discussions, the group debated the involvement of Sales or Finance in forecasting, if financial planning (FP&A) should be done in the same system as supply chain planning, and what the frequency of FP&A and S&OP should be, among others. After the debate, Bram wrapped up the event with a succinct summary and invited everyone to an enjoyable networking reception to round out this exciting day!