When a supply chain team decides to integrate a new enterprise solution, such as Supply Chain Planning, there is a general understanding that the process is lengthy and requires effort. The integration of a new solution is usually driven by the need to overcome organizational and technical inefficiencies. In a world of constant supply chain disruption and consumers expecting lightning-fast delivery, supply chain teams have never been more pressured to achieve high levels of efficiency.

Today’s customer case story features a company that sought out a new solution from a legacy provider and was left dissatisfied with the results. Back to manual Excel entries, the company could not afford another lengthy implementation process. Luckily enough, they found a solution provider who agreed to build out a custom tool to address their issues while not requiring an entire rip and replace.

Philipp Bruckner Breaks Down PPF’s Supply Chain and Manufacturing Operations

I had the opportunity to sit down with Philipp Bruckner, Senior Manager of Supply Chain Development at Partner in Pet Food (PPF), a leading pet food manufacturer in Europe.

PPF is responsible for multiple production facilities across Europe, serving customers all over Europe. They faced significant challenges in supply planning due to complex production requirements, tight margins, and the need for high efficiency. Their business model centers on private label manufacturing for supermarket chains and pet specialists, while also managing a portfolio of own brands, requiring flexible and efficient production runs to accommodate different languages, formats, and packaging requirements across markets.

PPF initially implemented a demand planning solution from a legacy provider, which worked well for forecasting but encountered obstacles when extending to supply planning, particularly in production planning and master production scheduling. The legacy provider’s system failed to accommodate the company’s need for high utilization and efficient production batching, resulting in lower utilization rates and excessive changeovers. PPF attempted to model complex requirements such as bundling products with different labels for various markets; however, multi‑label and language‑cluster–driven variants could not be adequately supported in all cases. As a result, the team continued to rely on traditional, manual Excel‑based processes.

How ketteQ and PPF’s Collaboration Began

After unsuccessful attempts with the legacy system and many months of implementation, PPF decided to engage with ketteQ, a name familiar to Philipp, who has had prior experience with various planning systems. ketteQ proposed a co-development approach, building a tailored solution to address the company’s specific bundling and efficiency needs, integrating directly with the existing demand planning system. The integration required transmitting both master and transactional data to ketteQ’s data solver. This system then evaluates multiple planning scenarios before returning the optimized production plan.

The development and integration process was rapid. ketteQ leveraged its knowledge of planning system models to streamline communication and data mapping. The implementation team in PPF was small, with most members balancing project work alongside daily responsibilities, yet the project progressed quickly due to ketteQ’s agile approach. The co-development model ensured that enhancements would benefit both PPF and future ketteQ clients.

The new solution drastically reduced planning time from hours to minutes but revealed underlying data quality and decision-making challenges within the company. Standardizing and cleaning master data, documenting capacities, and clarifying bundling strategies became critical steps to fully leverage the new system. The first plant that went live with ketteQ saw a 13% increase in capacity utilization, resulting in $8M in projected annual savings through improved production alignment and reduced waste. PPF now uses the optimizer to compare unconstrained and constrained scenarios, enabling more informed decisions about which customer forecasts to prioritize when capacities are limited.

The Future Collaboration Between ketteQ and PPF

Today, the solution is live in two factories, with rollouts planned for additional sites while PPF concurrently implements a new ERP system. I asked Philipp what future collaboration with ketteQ would look like, and he anticipates that in the long term, they will focus on inventory planning once the ERP rollout is complete.

ketteQ’s ability to drive measurable change for companies through its scenario modeling program, without requiring a “rip and replace” of legacy systems, is attractive to potential clients who have experienced lengthy implementations and are seeking a faster option. Supply chain teams are scarred by months- to year-long implementation processes, yet still want to implement changes to address pressing issues. PPF’s and ketteQ’s collaboration is a positive example of being able to address supply chain planning challenges without the massive efforts of implementing an entirely new solution suite.

Partner in Pet Food (PPF) is a leading European pet food manufacturer specializing in high-quality private label and branded solutions. Headquartered in Hungary, the company operates a network of state-of-the-art production facilities that supply nutritious cat and dog food to major retailers across more than 38 countries. They are recognized for their commitment to innovation and quality assurance, ensuring that millions of four-legged critics across the continent receive healthy, balanced meals.

ketteQ is a provider of AI-driven supply chain planning and execution solutions designed for the modern era of volatility. Built natively on the Salesforce platform and powered by its proprietary PolymatiQ solver, the company helps organizations transition from static, legacy planning to an adaptive, real-time approach. By leveraging machine learning and advanced analytics, ketteQ enables businesses to simulate thousands of scenarios, optimize inventory, and improve demand forecasting accuracy. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, the company serves a global clientele, empowering them to build resilient, transparent, and highly efficient supply chains.

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The proposed combination of Unilever’s food business and McCormick is not just a portfolio move. It is a test of whether greater scale can be converted into stronger sourcing leverage, tighter network design, and more disciplined execution across a broader global food platform.

Why This Deal Matters

The proposed transaction is large enough to draw attention on financial terms alone. But the more important issue is operational. The combination would place McCormick’s flavor, spice, and condiment portfolio alongside Unilever food brands such as Knorr and Hellmann’s in a much larger food platform.

That scale does not create value by itself. In consumer goods, large combinations are often framed around brand fit, category adjacency, and geographic reach. Those factors matter, but the harder question is whether the combined company can translate broader category exposure into a more effective supply chain system.

A Supply Chain Control Play

The most useful way to view the deal is as a control play. McCormick already holds a strong position in flavors, spices, condiments, and pantry-oriented categories. Unilever’s food business adds global reach, broader meal-solution exposure, and deeper international brand presence.

For supply chain leaders, that matters because broader product and channel exposure changes the shape of the operating network. It can improve procurement leverage, expand manufacturing options, and create more flexibility in regional distribution. It can also increase complexity quickly. A company managing spices, sauces, condiments, and meal-oriented packaged foods across multiple regions is managing a more demanding planning environment with different shelf-life profiles, promotional cycles, sourcing exposures, and service expectations.

Where the Synergies Have to Come From

The companies have pointed to roughly $600 million in annual cost savings. That figure is meaningful, but savings at that level do not come from presentation materials. They come from procurement discipline, footprint decisions, SKU rationalization, production alignment, and transportation execution.

The first opportunity is upstream. A larger ingredient and packaging spend can improve negotiating leverage and provide a better buffer against commodity volatility. But that leverage only becomes real if the combined company can standardize specifications where appropriate, reduce overlap, and rationalize supplier relationships without weakening resilience or product quality.

The second opportunity sits inside manufacturing and planning. A broader portfolio creates more options for plant specialization, co-manufacturing strategy, inventory positioning, and regional production assignment. It also raises the cost of weak coordination. When portfolios expand, planning errors propagate across more categories, channels, and geographies. Integration, in that context, is not an administrative exercise. It is the work that determines whether synergy targets are credible.

Network Design Will Determine the Outcome

The combined company would inherit a larger and more globally distributed operating footprint. That should create opportunities to redesign network flows, reduce duplication, and make more deliberate choices about where production should sit relative to demand, sourcing risk, and transportation cost.

But larger networks are not automatically better networks. They are often harder to simplify and slower to coordinate. The operating challenge is to determine which parts of the network should be consolidated, which should remain regionally differentiated, and where service levels matter more than efficiency. A food platform of this size must manage cost and throughput, but also freshness, shelf stability, retailer expectations, foodservice dynamics, and regional taste differences. Those constraints narrow the margin for error.

Channel Power Still Depends on Execution

There is also a channel implication. McCormick has long held strength in flavor-centric categories with broad household penetration. Unilever’s food business adds deeper scale in everyday meal and condiment categories across retail and food channels.

That matters because channel strength increasingly depends on execution reliability rather than simple shelf presence. Suppliers that maintain fill rates, support promotions without destabilizing inventory, and preserve working capital discipline hold a stronger position with retailers and distribution partners. In that sense, this deal is as much about operating consistency as it is about category expansion.

Regulatory and Integration Risk Remain Real

The market’s initial response suggests that investors understand the opportunity but do not yet fully trust the path. Concerns have focused on valuation, deal structure, closing timeline, and likely antitrust scrutiny. Those are not side issues. They connect directly to execution.

A prolonged closing period can delay decisions on footprint, sourcing, systems integration, and organization design. Regulatory uncertainty can slow consolidation actions. Labor concerns can complicate plant and workforce decisions. This is also a structurally complex transaction rather than a simple cash acquisition, which raises the execution bar further.

What Supply Chain Leaders Should Watch

For supply chain executives, the most useful lens is not whether the transaction sounds strategically sensible. It is where management places operational emphasis as integration planning advances. The key signals will be supplier consolidation strategy, manufacturing footprint decisions, network redesign, service-level performance, and the discipline applied to portfolio simplification.

This is also a broader industry signal. In mature food categories, scale is less about revenue aggregation than about who can run a more coordinated system. Companies that combine sourcing power, better planning, tighter execution, and consistent channel service will protect margins more effectively than those that simply add volume.

The strategic rationale behind the Unilever-McCormick transaction is understandable. The operating burden is the real story. If the combined company improves control across sourcing, manufacturing, and distribution, the deal will look disciplined. If not, skepticism around the transaction will remain justified.

The post Unilever-McCormick Deal Puts Supply Chain Execution at the Center appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

Costs are rising again. That part is familiar. What is less clear, and more important, is where margin is actually won or lost inside a supply chain. It is not at the line item level. It is in how decisions play out across the system.

Where Cost Programs Start and Stall

When costs rise, most organizations go to the same places first. Transportation. Procurement. Warehousing. That is where the pressure is visible, and where teams are expected to respond.

Transportation renegotiates rates. Procurement pushes suppliers. Operations looks for incremental gains. Each function does its job and usually finds something. But the overall cost position does not move nearly as much as expected.

This is a pattern. It shows up across industries and across cycles.

The issue is not effort. It is structure. Supply chain margin is not determined inside any one function. It is shaped by how decisions interact across functions, often in ways that are not fully visible when those decisions are made.

The Stack, Not the Category

Supply chains operate as a stack of linked decisions. Not a collection of independent cost centers.

Network design sets the footprint. Sourcing defines cost and exposure. Inventory policy determines how much buffer exists in the system. Transportation turns plans into movement. Fulfillment is where cost and service finally meet the customer.

These are tightly connected. Change one, and something else moves.

A lower unit cost from a more distant supplier often increases transportation exposure. A network designed for speed tends to carry more inventory. A transportation savings initiative can introduce service variability that shows up later, usually as exception cost.

Most inefficiency does not sit neatly inside a function. It lives in the seams.

What Actually Moves Margin

In practice, margin moves in a few predictable ways.

Trade-offs are one. Cost and service are often optimized in different parts of the organization without a shared view. That leads to overperformance in some areas and unnecessary cost in others. It is rarely intentional.

Variability is another. Delays, disruptions, demand swings. These introduce cost that does not show up in standard models but accumulates quickly through expedites, rework, and recovery efforts. In many networks, this is where margin quietly erodes.

Then there is timing. Decisions are often made too early. Planning cycles lock in assumptions that no longer hold by the time execution begins. From there, the system spends the rest of the cycle adjusting. Usually at a higher cost.

This is less about modeling accuracy and more about when decisions are made.

What Is Changing

What is changing, gradually but clearly, is where decisions are being made.

In some operations, decision making is moving closer to execution. Routing is adjusted during the day. Carrier selection is not fixed for long. Inventory moves in response to conditions, not just plans. Exceptions are handled as they happen.

Not everywhere. But enough to notice.

The difference shows up in small ways at first. Less rework. Fewer expedites. Fewer surprises late in the cycle. Over time, it adds up. The gap between plan and outcome narrows, and that is where margin starts to appear.

The Role of Technology

Technology plays a role here, but it is not the story on its own.

Better decisions require coordination and speed. That is difficult with static systems and fragmented data. What is improving is the ability to process current conditions and adjust without waiting for a full planning reset.

In some environments, that is supported by AI and advanced analytics. In others, it is driven by process discipline and better visibility. Either way, the common thread is shorter distance between signal and response.

What to Watch

A few things tend to separate stronger operators from the rest.

One is coordination. Whether sourcing, transportation, and inventory decisions are made with a shared understanding of cost and service.

Another is response speed. How quickly the organization adjusts when something changes.

And then there is visibility. Whether trade-offs are understood when decisions are made, or only discovered later through cost and service misses.

These are not abstract measures. They show up in day-to-day performance.

Closing Perspective

Cost pressure is not new. Most organizations know where their major cost categories sit.

What is changing is how those costs are managed. Margin is not coming from isolated savings initiatives as much as it once did. It is coming from better coordination, better timing, and fewer corrections during execution.

That is harder to see than a rate reduction. It is also where most of the improvement is coming from now.

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