Blackmores cuts demand forecast time in half with Acterys

Blackmores is Australia’s leading natural health company. Founded in the 1930s, the company delivers health solutions using the highest quality ingredients to people and their pets everywhere. Blackmores has expanded consistently over the last 20 years, employing some 1,200 people, and operating across 13 markets including Australia and New Zealand, Greater China, and South-East Asia and Korea.

Known for its vitamins and supplements, the company faces complex demand cycles, seasonal fluctuations, and supply chain constraints—all of which make accurate planning a strategic imperative. Matt Minor, Head of Group Data & Analytics at Blackmores Group, recognized that “we needed a more dynamic planning framework that could connect demand planning directly to a more strategic financial forecasting approach.”

Addressing key challenges

“We had got to the stage across all our markets where we had disparate processes around how we captured demand forecast. There was no uniformity – Australia was by far and away the most mature market, but newer countries operated differently, with some offering bottom-up builds by customer and product, and others working at a channel or market level. All markets thought they had nuances in their operations, so there was no universal forecasting model or template. The result was that we had many different levels of data that we needed to bring together to inform our wider group forecasts,” explained Matt.

“We clearly needed a much more consistent way of capturing accurate demand forecasts so that we could not only understand what all our business partners and customers would be ordering from Blackmores, but ensure that we had the right inventory in the right warehouse at the right time,” he added. “Also when markets gave their forecasts, which may have taken them up to three days to get together, they effectively had no ability to look back and query their data. Did they hit their forecast? If not, why was that? There were no underlying customer or product information, and no record of how they came up with their forecasts.”

Enabling a more integrated planning approach

When considering a next generation planning engine to support its operations, Blackmores had a number of key requirements. “ First off we needed an enterprise platform that could handle our significant volumes of data. With up to 400 SKUs in our larger markets, there’s a whole heap of data to process, particularly if we want to get down to a bottom-up forecast across all our markets. Indeed our average Australian forecast alone ranged between 2.5 and 3 million records per month,” explained Matt.

“Critically, we needed a solution that could both capture all this planning data while also allowing us to report on it, break it down, analyze it, and use our findings to improve next month’s forecast and all the ones after that,” he continued. “We also wanted to minimize change so that meant deploying a solution that was not only intuitive but that would also leverage our existing investment in the Microsoft ecosystem.”

Blackmores selected Acterys Planning Intelligence

Blackmores selected the Acterys Planning Intelligence solution to address and deliver against these challenges. Acterys provides a centralized platform for enterprise financial planning, analysis and decision-making, working seamlessly with Microsoft Power BI and Excel, backed by game-changing enterprise write-back capabilities.

Blackmores chose Acterys because the business needed a more consistent way to produce accurate demand forecasts, wanted to establish a common systems approach to collecting data, and also enable increased demand visibility and transparency across their operations. They also recognized that the Acterys could deliver the greater granularity needed to break down and analyze their forecasts.

“We had a look at the different tools and options available, and chose Acterys Planning Intelligence because it not only delivered in terms of our enterprise planning and write-back requirements, but also was a great fit with our Microsoft technology stack,” said Matt, “The fact that Acterys leveraged all the best bits of Power BI and that it sat on Azure SQL Server fitted our use case perfectly.”

Putting Acterys to work

Blackmores worked with its partner Antares to implement an Acterys-based dynamic planning framework that aligned its regional demand signals with its global financial targets.

Blackmores’ Acterys deployment brings together driver-based forecasting, scenario planning, rolling forecasting, and collaborative planning across finance, operations and marketing teams. Data from Snowflake forecasting and multiple regional Excel spreadsheets is integrated from Power BI via Acterys, enabling real-time enterprise write-back and scenario modeling across markets.

Linking demand drivers to P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow models, as well as enabling rolling forecasts and variance analysis across regions mean that Blackmores now runs a harmonized planning process where demand signals are not just numbers—they’re monetized insights driving global financial decisions. Additionally, scenario planning for simulated supply chain disruptions, regulatory changes and demand surges has helped Blackmores turn its planning function from a reactive model to a more predictive and strategic capability

Delivering results for Blackmores

For Blackmores the biggest impact in the early days of the project was reducing the Australian close. Previously, preparing the demand forecast took up to three days. Working with Acterys cut this in half, knocking a day and a half off the time taken to prepare the forecast.

Another key outcome was the ability to learn and make forecasts more accurate. Acterys enabled the Blackmores team to create new demand forecasts on the fly, taking advantage of increased granularity to increase accuracy and bring uniformity to 13 markets across the region.

Blackmores was also able to optimize licensing costs around OpEx forecasting, migrating some 75 users out of its existing FP&A solution by using Acterys to manage their OpEx account entries and saving up to AUD150,000 in annual licensing costs.

Because the dynamic Acterys framework connects demand planning directly to financial forecasting, Blackmores is also now able to use the software to produce fully monetized demand plans and new financial forecasts. This has helped to increase accuracy, reflect revenue, cost and margin aspects, as well as reducing lead times, and has been a huge step forward.

Broadening Acterys functionality

Having deployed Acterys for demand forecasting, Blackmores was also able to take advantage of the consistent Acterys interface and minimal training requirements to extend the software’s functionality. All of the below-the-line  forecasting has now transferred to Acterys, enabling the creation of bottom-up budget builds for OpEx.

Blackmores now also uses Acterys to support Purchase Price Variance (PPV), capturing the gaps between quoted prices and actual delivery costs. Acterys lets the team calculate these variances and determine their underlying reasons. This level of insight removes potential variance uncertainties and enables working with suppliers to capture PPV on their side.

“At Blackmores we recognized Power BI as a highly intuitive reporting user interface that had traction right across the business. With its enterprise write-back capability, Acterys introduced real-time direct access to data across our regions, so – for example – if a user adjusted a pricing level or the number of units for a particular month, they could visually see the impact of that decision on their plan,” said Matt. “With Acterys we’ve now got real-time, centralized data that we can share from the executive level right down to the detailed inter-market level. Acterys opened our minds to both generating and maintaining the data – it’s been an absolute game-changer for us in terms of being able to manage change across the organization.”

Results

• 50% reduction in demand forecast preparation time
• Unlocked AUD150,000 in annual license cost savings
• Creation of fully-monetized demand plans and financial forecasts