Integrated planning at Lehmann&Voss

valantic has created a common planning process for all business areas, standardized workflows and ultimately reduced costs and effort. The basis was the multi-award-winning integrated planning solution APOLLO (by IBM Planning Analytics). APOLLO customers plan with the best and fastest that the market currently has to offer.

Integrated planning at Lehmann&Voss brings up-to-date forecasts, transparency and precision to sales and capacity planning

The company: Lehmann & Voss

Lehmann&Voss&Co.KG is a chemical company with a long tradition that was founded in Hamburg in 1894. Thanks to the flexible combination of the three procurement channels distribution, retail, and production, Lehmann&Voss and its subsidiaries offer a wide range of specialty chemical and mineral products. The company’s extensive portfolio includes granules, plastics, rubber, high-performance plastics used in motors, and temperature-resistant paints, lacquers, and oils, among other products.

Currently, the company employs about 600 people and serves approximately 7,000 customers worldwide. Lehmann&Voss operates its own research laboratories, application consulting, and, in addition to its headquarters in Hamburg, it is represented by four production sites and 18 subsidiaries, among others in the USA, England, and China.

Challenge & goal

Digitalization and globalization of sales and capacity planning

Employees at Lehmann&Voss were doing most of the sales and capacity planning manually. Manual data preparation and analysis, for example, took up a lot of time. The comparison of planning requirements with the results achieved was not done in real time based on current data, but at weekly or monthly intervals or “on call,” depending on the business unit.

Lehmann&Voss’s goal was to create a common planning process for all business units, define standardized workflows, monitor relevant KPIs continuously, and ultimately reduce costs and expenses.

Success Story Lehmann&Voss-Integrated Business Planning

Solutions and results in detail

Through external partners and workshops, Lehmann&Voss discovered the integrated planning solution APOLLO. After the initial evaluation, valantic was on the short list of three providers, and it then won over the planners and decision-makers at Lehmann&Voss in the subsequent test case. APOLLO was selected and the project began in August 2021.

“We have achieved a lot and we have gotten really good, thank you very much to our colleagues at valantic for the smooth cooperation!” says Christian Rohwer, Head of Materials Management at Lehmann&Voss.

Before APOLLO, the Lehmann&Voss divisions used an Excel spreadsheet with greater granularity and stored their forecasts in SAP. Typically, once a year, a big plan was created using Excel; sales planning and long-term business development were derived from this. “The whole thing was very manual and required intensive coordination, and we wanted to move away from this,” is how Christian Rohwer describes the starting point.

Common tasks in production and capacity planning could hardly be handled promptly and efficiently with such a manual planning solution. Here’s an example: Are the available resources sufficient for on-time order processing, or should external partners be used for production? Integrated planning solutions help the people responsible for planning confront this kind of challenge in a timely and partially automated manner.

The sales planning data such as customer requirements and orders – which can be selected, among other things, according to sectors, business divisions, on down to individual customers – comes from SAP ERP and is uploaded to APOLLO. Specialist colleagues then make adjustments to the sales volumes and customers’ needs. Subsequently, the S&OP managers discuss the adjusted sales planning with the managers from sales, production, and purchasing in order to arrive at a coordinated pre-planning requirement.

Production and capacity planning is a tricky business that is not immune to surprises. “We simulate production, the utilization of specialist personnel, and production machines. But what happens if, for example, our sales drop by 20%?” asks Daniel Copius, Head of Product Supply Management at Lehmann&Voss, posing a question that he has actually encountered. It may also happen that pre-components or raw materials are not delivered in the planned quantity required for production.

“With APOLLO, we can simulate such changes quickly, respond to them, and fulfill our commitment to our customers,” Copius confirms. “The strength of APOLLO with TM1 is its simulation capabilities. By integrating modules for different experts along the S&OP process, APOLLO enables optimal integration of knowledge combined with standardized calculation rules,” he continues.

“APOLLO has made our planning really good. We have achieved a great deal and we want to optimize our processes even more,” summarizes Christian Rohwer, Head of Materials Management at Lehmann&Voss. Michael Sowade, Senior Consultant at valantic Business Analytics, also confirms this: “valantic’s consultants and implementation partners were able to incorporate all their experience and planning expertise at Lehmann&Voss. The cooperation with the colleagues at Lehmann&Voss was very effective and pleasant.”

Go live of the integrated planning tool APOLLO

The sales planning went live in March 2022 – and the capacity planning GoLive happened in January 2023. With the integrated planning tool APOLLO, Lehmann&Voss has eliminated data silos, automated planning processes, and equipped all stakeholders involved in the planning process with meaningful dashboards and an intuitive user interface. This enables APOLLO to provide a transparent view of business units such as sales and SCM.

The planners at Lehmann&Voss can react to changes in the market in a targeted and proactive manner. APOLLO’s modular architecture also allows the scope of services to be expanded quickly and with little effort.

Integrated planning at Lehmann&Voss