Case Study: Saarioinen achieves under 5% forecast error and streamlined production-to-consumer planning with RELEX Solutions

Saarioinen Improving Processes All the Way from Production to the Consumers

Saarioinen, a Finnish ready-meals market leader founded in 1957, operates multiple factories and offers about 900 SKUs. To keep freshness high and spoilage low, the company needed to modernize demand planning: move from manual, retail- and promotion-driven guessing to customer-oriented, measurable forecasts that tie into financial and production planning, despite imperfect historical customer-level data.

Saarioinen implemented RELEX in a four-month project (live Jan 2017), trained super-users, and later added sales budgeting and automated promotion forecasting. Today RELEX feeds planning, production, sales and logistics; baseline forecasts are used directly when no exceptions exist while planners handle anomalies. The change cut forecast error to under 5% for many high-volume products, improved accuracy on challenging items, and strengthened Saarioinen’s market position.

Saarioinen

Satu Haapala

Demand Planning Manager