SAS® optimizes supply chain decisions at Bunge

Bunge Alimentos reduces agribusiness costs using SAS/OR®

SAS Global Forum, ORLANDO, FLA  (April 17, 2007)  –  Logistics optimization creates supply chain efficiencies with SAS, the leader in business intelligence. Bunge Alimentos, one of the world’s largest agribusiness and food companies, with a wide product distribution network, needed a solution to improve their logistic process analysis and to reduce costs. Bunge chose SAS software to integrate data and perform descriptive and predictive analysis to solve even their most complex optimization problems.

Using optimization in the manufacturing industry guides better decision making. It shows how to use the available resources (people, materials, silos, plants, tools, machines and time), producing finished goods in the most efficient way possible. Though decision makers are diligent, as the complexity of business and of the production process increases, visualizing all the options in order to choose the best one becomes literally impossible. Optimization becomes not only useful but necessary for sound decisions.

"We saw opportunities to better structure supply and demand planning, shipment planning, taxes, and the use of logistical assets in an integrated and proactive way," said Luis Fernando Neves, Agribusiness Planning Manager at Bunge in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil. "Logistical costs in commodities are one of the leading factors determining competitiveness. We needed to anticipate problems more quickly and take corrective steps before problems arose. Using SAS/OR, it became easier to reduce the company's costs."

Those changes started a year and a half ago when Bunge’s executives requested the services of SAS. Within one year, they implemented the new optimized network in the agribusiness division, and the benefits became clear.

According to Neves, by using SAS/OR operations research software, the company gained agility in its decision-making. "Decisions are made in a more encompassing and rational manner, taking into account all the key elements of logistical planning."

The benefits are significant. With its new action model for commodities distribution, Bunge is able to prevent waste of time as it chooses the best transportation routes. Thus, it reduces its supply-chain costs.

"Talk about a competitive advantage – Bunge eagerly implemented SAS/OR and they quickly jumped ahead of companies that hadn’t yet discovered operations research," said Mary Crissey, Analytics Marketing Manager at SAS. "Recently, there’s been a cross-industry surge of interest backed by resources to implement such analytics in the Americas, matching the track record of successful SAS/OR implementations in Europe. In this time of tight corporate responsibility, sound business decisions and planning are imperatives. No company should be without SAS/OR as the foundation addressing such imperatives."

Optimization delivers winning answers

Optimization means choosing a set of actions or decisions that obey all of the rules and produce the best possible results. For the supply chain problems that large businesses and organizations confront – production planning, demand planning, strategic sourcing and logistics planning, and inventory management, for example – optimization software works with mathematical models of business systems to quickly deliver winning answers.

Enhanced SAS/OR software provides a powerful set of operations research tools for building strategic and tactical planning models. SAS is also a leading provider of sourcing and supplier intelligence solutions providing manufacturers visibility into their spend, supplier performance and supply chain risk, thus helping them optimize their supply base, reducing overall costs and making the supply chain more robust.

Today’s announcement came at SAS Global Forum, an annual conference attended by more than 3,500 SAS users from around the world.

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Luis Fernando Neves, Agribusiness Planning Manager, Bunge 
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