Turning down more than $1 million a year in new orders is not something any company wants to do. Yet that’s what Lodge Cast Iron did as it struggled to accurately meet production demands. The 120-year-old Tennessee company, which manufactures more than 350 different SKUs of cast-iron cookware, addressed this challenge on two fronts: It opened a brand-new foundry in late 2017, increasing manufacturing capacity by 75 percent. And it transformed its demand, production, and purchasing processes and implemented a monthly S&OP process using the Anaplan platform.
With Anaplan, Lodge’s demand and production planners can run scenarios and almost instantly tell what the foundries have the capacity to produce, and how changes in plans affect other items in production. Lodge has longer manufacturing runs with fewer changeovers now, resulting in greater efficiency and less production downtime. They’ve also decreased how long it takes to fulfill orders. “Improvements in uptime and efficiency, along with better inventory planning, mean we’ll realize 100 percent ROI from Anaplan in less than a year,” says Sam Touchstone, SVP Finance/CIO.