ITTOOLKIT [ IN PRACTICE ]
TMS and DRP: The Recipe for Resilience
Like many companies navigating the pandemic, Ajinomoto Foods North America (AFNA) faced multiple supply chain challenges including disruptions, changing consumer preferences, and rising freight and warehousing costs.
THE CUSTOMER Ajinomoto Foods North America (AFNA) is a leading manufacturer of frozen foods, known for producing a wide range of Asian-inspired and comfort food products for grocery stores, restaurants, and institutional customers across North America. As a subsidiary of Japan-based Ajinomoto Co., the company leverages global expertise in seasonings, amino acids, and food innovation to develop high-quality offerings. THE PROVIDER EY Consulting, the advisory arm of Ernst & Young, provides strategy, transformation, and technology services to organizations worldwide. The practice helps clients improve performance by aligning business strategy with digital innovation, risk management, and operational efficiency. EY Consulting helps companies navigate complex challenges, drive growth, and build long-term value.
weren’t located where they were most needed, which impacted service levels and costs. Because AFNA lacked a robust planning system, management often wouldn’t know, for instance, that Plant A needed 30 trucks in a specific sequence and going to specific locations. Sometimes delivery trucks were dispatched when half full, wasting space. Verdin and her colleagues often struggled to access carriers’ rates and performance, hampering their efforts to evaluate them.
Rather than settle for getting back to normal, however, management decided to transform the company’s supply chain organization, including its production planning process, which had been largely manual. AFNA also implemented a more robust transportation management system. To accomplish this, AFNA partnered with EY Consulting and implemented software from Blue Yonder and Oracle. The supply chain organization within AFNA, the company behind multiple consumer brands including Ajinomoto, Tai Pei, José Olé, and Hondashi, faced several challenges as it worked to optimize operations in the face of multiple challenges occurring during the pandemic. One challenge was the autonomy of its nine manufacturing plants. “They weren’t aligned,” says Gema Verdin, global vice president of supply chain management planning. There was no standardization and no formal best practice. If a salesperson needed more of a specific product, they typically would just call a colleague and ask for additional units. Production planning for the plants and more than 30 co-packers had been managed by spreadsheets, each of which also varied between plants. Products often
FROM SPREADSHEETS TO CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
EY, a professional services firm, had been AFNA’s audit partner. When that engagement concluded, AFNA was able to work with EY as a consultant. Together, the two companies helped AFNA transition from a production scheduling process that had been based on spreadsheets to a continuous improvement process that provided analytics that could help AFNA take action. As part of this transition, AFNA implemented the BY Enterprise Supply Planning solution from Blue Yonder, which focuses on distribution requirements planning (DRP).
by Karen Kroll
April 2026 • Inbound Logistics 69
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