Natures Pride

Nature’s Pride was the first company in Europe to market Ready-to-Eat mangos and avocados. Together with Product League they have improved key processes and with that their quality towards end-users. We continue to work together for the best produce. Ready-to-eat fruit.

Description
One of Nature’s Pride’s key products is Ready-to-Eat fruit. The fruit arrives at the warehouse in an “unripe” status and in special ripening rooms the fruit is ripened in a couple of days to Ready-to-Eat fruit. To avoid wasting products, it is necessary to match this process with sales demand. This data is required for planning ships and trucks, which is the basis for fruit to be scheduled into the ripening process or into stock. One of the requirements was that the demand dealt with the stock in the right way, maximizing the remaining shelf life of the product and thus ensuring excellent quality for the end consumer.

To stay flexible, another challenge was enabling the possibility to intervene in the planning process, by being able to change varieties, pre-producing on certain days of the week and changing sizes to balance supply and demand.

Solution
The project team collected information about the current processes from buyers, planners, ripening experts and sales and created a flow that linked these processes together. The information had to be gathered from various locations. The planning process now starts with the correct incoming forecasts and sales demands. Combined with the actual stock and the parameters for the ripening processes, Nature’s Pride can create a planning on the sales side, as well as the incoming side, daily up to 3 weeks in advance and on a weekly basis up to 13 weeks (about 3 months) ahead.

Benefits
With the newly given insight into the incoming quantities, actual demand and predictive ripening process implemented into our suite of business-critical application, combined with the undisputed quality of the underlying product, Nature’s Pride can ensure that the right product will be sent to customers at the right time, with minimum operational (and product) waste.