Every litre counts

From push and pull to one shared goal

DMK's historically siloed, manual planning processes across sales, demand, supply, and replenishment limited its agility and transparency. Different tools, unclear interdependencies, and limited communication made it difficult to react quickly to demand and supply changes, often causing inefficiencies, stockouts, high safety stocks, and the kind of manual firefighting that quickly steals too much time away from the fun and meaningful work.

As market volatility and uncertainty increased, so did the complexity of planning. And as a result, DMK needed a new integrated planning organisation and system to overcome disconnected tools and limited end-to-end visibility.

Unlike most industries, dairy planning is both push- and pull-driven: raw milk arrives daily and must be processed before it expires – creating a push. Customer demand, on the other hand, pulls production in its own direction. DMK's response: one integrated process, from forecast to execution, directing every litre of milk to its highest-value use.

A key early insight for the Implement team: dairy planning is often assumed to work like most manufacturing – a straightforward, linear flow from raw material to finished product. Milk breaks that assumption immediately. Because it arrives daily and cannot wait, and because customer demand pulls production in a completely different direction, planners are effectively solving two opposing equations at once, every single day. That push-pull duality – not just the volume or the number of products – turned out to be the real complexity to design for.

To address these challenges, DMK decided to strengthen its planning capabilities, dismantling the old planning silos and connecting sales with demand, supply, and replenishment using SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) with a focus on operational supply planning.

One partner, from design to daily operations

These challenges also pointed to a clear opportunity: Creating a fully integrated, digital end-to-end planning chain using SAP IBP Time Series and Order-Based Planning would enable daily demand-driven, constraint-aware supply planning and seamless execution. This would allow DMK to improve responsiveness, collaboration, raw material utilisation, planning efficiency, and operational resilience across its complex, multi-site supply network.

Understanding that network meant getting close to it. The Implement team spent time on the ground at DMK's headquarters in Bremen and at production sites in Zeven and Edewecht in Germany, as well as Hoogeveen in the Netherlands – walking the same factory floors the new system would eventually run. Cheese vats, salting baths, the sheer scale of industrial cheese production: seeing a single block of cheese travel all the way from the production line to the graded, packaged product you would recognise on any supermarket shelf – the same one that might end up on a pizza at home – made the abstract planning logic concrete. At one point, the team even took on the role of a butter-making machine themselves, walking through the process step by step to understand it from the inside out.

Over more than two years, DMK moved from design to full rollout of SAP IBP Order-Based Planning across butter, cheese confection, cheese block, and fresh products. Today, roughly 1,000,000 forecast records are released daily from IBP Time Series into IBP OBP, feeding high-frequency supply heuristics that run every two hours to maintain a current, feasible plan. 

Each planning cycle considers prioritisation rules, product interdependencies, shelf-life logic, and capacity constraints – then releases planned orders and stock transfer requirements into ECC for execution.

Implement supported DMK end-to-end across the full transformation journey – from co-creating the initial solution design, drawing on experience from previous supply chain and SAP IBP implementations, through implementation, change requests, user training, and post-go-live stabilisation.

Working closely with SAP and DMK's planners throughout, Implement's team translated DMK-specific, often intricate, business rules into a scalable, production-ready planning solution. This continuity of partnership, spanning co-creation, design, implementation, and sustained business adoption, was key to translating complex requirements into daily planner reality – built, in no small part, on the relationships formed along the way through shared dinners, table football tournaments, and a level of trust that made it easier to challenge each other's thinking when a design choice needed rethinking. In short, the everyday energy needed to turn a simple project team into a working partnership.

Proof, by the numbers

The results speak for themselves: plan adherence improved by more than 10%, and safety days of supply were reduced by over 5% – direct evidence that DMK's planners now work from plans they can trust. Processing capacity now exceeds 48,000 orders per hour, with product availability and delivery reliability improving in parallel.

DMK did not need a vendor for a project – it needed a partner for the entire journey. As our relationship already went back several years and had been built on several successful projects together, we were happy to be invited to go on this specific journey with DMK, all the way from co-creation through design, rollout, and sustained adoption.