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Chloride Batteries South East Asia (A division of Exide International)

Chloride Batteries S E Asia is a part of the battery manufacturing group, Exide International. CBSEA enjoys a position of leadership in the automotive and industrial battery market throughout the Asia Pacific region. Its manufacturing range covers automotive batteries to Electric Forklift Batteries, DC Power backup for Telecom, Power and the Oil & Gas sectors, miners cap lamps, railway signalling& train lighting and even Submarine batteries.

WHY

The battery market in Asia had been witnessing steady growth, but CBSEA, once a market leader was increasingly coming under competitive pressures from high quality, high value international players as well low cost, agile Chinese manufacturers. They were facing negative impacts in both revenue and margins over the past years. Also, very high dependence on a few key customers was introducing higher levels of uncertainty and doubts over sustainability of the business.

HOW

CBSE management decided to embark on an initiative to transform their value chain by implementing the S&OP process for their entire Asia operations, headquartered in Singapore. Main goal wasfor the leadership team make better cross-functional decisions in the organizationin order to continually achieves higher customer satisfaction, alignment and synchronization among all functions of the organization, in line with the Business Strategy. ValueQwest was engaged as the consulting partner to help CBSEA through this transformational journey

 

WHAT

The S&OP Process Pilot implementation was completed within a span of 3 months.

This included:

  • The core team setup
  • Awareness and communication sessions
  • Training sessions on S&OP concepts with the leadership and the extended team
  • Deciding on the product family scope of the pilot (automotive batteries)
  • Data extract builds and S&OP dashboard creations from the SAP system for driving the S&OP cycles
  • Facilitating the S&OP process steps – Data collection, Demand Planning, Supply Planning, Partnership meetings and finally the Executive S&OP meetings

Simultaneous benefits in terms of improved customer service levels, forecast accuracies and inventory holding came through during the 3-month period itself. The initial hesitation and resistance to implement the end-to-end integrated planning process, was replaced with unbound enthusiasm and eagerness to extend the S&OP scope to the entire product family of CBSEA, immediately after the 3-month pilot.

In the words of the CEO of CBSEA, “you have opened our eyes on how adopting a demand driven approach and breaking the silos can transform and organization, both in terms of tangible performance metrics, and a positive working culture”.