Charles River Connected Systems to Reduce Backorders by 90%  

  • Team Inulta

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Charles River, the American pharmaceutical company specialized in preclinical and clinical laboratory, cell therapy, and gene therapy services, deployed supply planning solutions on Wolters Kluwer’s CCH Tagetik platform to reduce backorders, expiring inventory and shipping costs. Inulta played a major role in connecting all existing applications, systems, and data into a single, unified financial management system. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread in early 2020, Charles River’s products saw a surge in demand from new customers, recurring orders from regular customers, and warnings from raw materials suppliers – leading to uncertainty within their supply chain. In order to enable the company to fully grasp the growth in demand, anticipate future demand and determine if the events fall under a pattern, the company implemented CCH Tagetik Supply Chain Planning, the leading supply chain planning solution deployed by Wolters Kluwer, which resulted in an 84% decrease in backorders, combined with optimized inventory and increased competitive advantage.  

Using CCH Tagetik’s forecasts, the client could understand the spikes in demand, plan the order fulfillment accordingly, determine which warehouses to stock, and plan production increases. CCH Tagetik enabled Charles River to account for various scenarios and predict production decisions utilizing the vertical alignment of sales and operations data.

The effective implementation of CCH Tagetik Sales and Operations Planning resulted in multiple positive outcomes:  

  • Backorders consistently reduced by 84%;  
  • 68% decrease in backorder days;  
  • 86% decrease in items on backorder; 
  • Expiring inventory write-offs anticipated to be reduced by 75%; 
  • Enabled shipping costs reduction of 40% for select products with bulk Shipment; 

About two years later, in 2022, with the goal of eliminating mistakes caused by siloed systems, reducing the need for data reconciliation and simplifying data management, Inulta stepped in and helped expand product capabilities to fit the current needs. 

Looking to turn data into information, gain actionable insights and elevate strategic decision making, Charles River managed to collect and store granular financial, non-financial and operational data from diverse sources (e.g. multiple ERPs, floating files, manual data entry) and adapt data structure to accommodate financial and operational needs with Inulta and CCH Tagetik, powered by the Analytic Information Hub (AIH). 

We now have a single source of truth. Inulta’s integration gives us the power to mine insights from over 14 sources of granular data to quickly produce actionable results. This speed allows us better control over financial data and lets the controllers team produce detailed reports on-demand. Everybody is speaking the same language.” said Jody Rogers, CPIM CSCP, Director Global Supply Chain, Charles River. 

The successful implementation paved the road for a full Integrated Business Planning approach, a comprehensive solution for strategic, financial, sales, supply chain, and operational planning, meant to break down barriers between finance and operations.  

About Charles River’s Microbial Solutions division 

The Microbial Solutions division of Charles River offers progressive products and services that deliver accurate, relevant, and reliable data to fuel confident decisions on product quality and contamination control. For further information visit www.criver.com