Company: Yıldız Tech (Yildiz Holding)
Company background: Yıldız Holding is the largest food manufacturer in CEEMEA (Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), generating revenues of 170 billion TL in 2022 across all businesses. The company employs 75,000 people and has 46 factories (25 of which are outside Turkey). Yıldız Holding has over 300+ brands available in more than 100+ countries. Through Yıldız Holding’s core focus on biscuits, cakes and confectionery, a company has become number two in the world in the sweet biscuits category and number seven in the chocolate category by revenue. Yıldız Tech is an Information Technology company of Yildiz Holding founded as an IT Excellence Center focusing on Digital Transformation, Artificial Intelligence and E-Commerce.
Contact: Utkan Menteş
Title: Director, Advanced Analytics Solutions
Country: Turkey
Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver
Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve?
Having millions of customers and consumers, Yildiz Holding companies need to frequently replenish customer demands. Doing so requires complex, accurate demand planning to avoid unnecessary stock outages and sell-outs. Advanced forecasting algorithms needed to increase forecasting accuracy.
How did you use SAS to solve that business problem? What products did you use and how did you use them?
SAS Visual Forecasting tools helped us to maximize the accuracy of each forecasting unit.Best models and parameters selected by auto forecasting provided us a high quality output.Besides the modeling stage, preprocessing, feature selection and outlier correction steps are accelarated thanks to SAS.
What were the results or outcomes?
The forecasting accuracy rate across the group increased by 15%, while overstocks and understocks were significantly decreased. We eliminated several disjointed processes for demand sensing and replaced them with much fasted, integrated ones.
Why is this approach innovative?
Thanks to SAS, we achieved to have an end-to-end integrated demand sensing process to optimize replenishment. In addition to this, our category managers now have a perfect simulation tool and decision support to forecast the effects of promotions and decide the right campaign mix.
