Pigments Division taps Zemeter Software to manage thousands of complex chemical products
Wilmington, DE — June 29, 2004 — Supply Chain Consultants (SCC), designer and supplier of the Zemeter suite of supply chain management software products, announced today that the Pigments Division of EMD Chemicals has selected SCC's collaborative forecasting software solution to facilitate planning.
EMD, headquartered in Gibbstown, N.J., is the North American specialty chemical operation of Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany.
The Pigments Division operates three major manufacturing facilities globally and has seven distribution centers across the United States. The division employs more than 200 people in the United States and has 20 salespeople located throughout the country. The company sells more than 4,000 products and has more than 20,000 active stock-keeping units.
"Part of the challenge we faced at EMD Pigments was to find a way to decentralize our forecasting process and take it closer to the customer," said Mark Wells, director of customer fulfillment at EMD. "The number and complexity of our products makes accurate forecasting extremely important to our budgeting process. We evaluated six possible solutions and found that Zemeter software provides us with the most flexible and easy-to-use framework to compile this critical data."
Zemeter Collaborative Forecasting software is designed to facilitate use by the sales force. "Our process in the past was very informal and each sales person handled their input in a separate fashion," said Wells. "Our old methodology also was not suitable for multiple users and, to avoid confusion, access was controlled. Zemeter is designed to easily provide forecast data to more users across more functions."
EMD also found that Zemeter software enables quick response to variances in demand. "Our products are used in so many applications that our manufacturing can be substantially impacted when one of our customers introduces a new product or ends production of a product," explained Wells.
Jim Heatherington, director of business development for Supply Chain Consultants, added that managing the forecasting and planning process in a complex manufacturing environment like EMD Chemicals is a rigorous test for any supply chain management software. "The successful application of Zemeter in EMD and a number of other major chemical companies adds to our knowledge and skill set in serving this key industry."
