BSM’s Formulation Case Study Bites: Formulation

Case Study Bite #1 – BSM Partners developed a tool that accelerated formulation database migration for a Fortune 500 pet food company

BSM Partners is a leading consulting firm operating in the pet and human food industries, and a collective of professionals across a wide variety of industries, backgrounds, and life experiences. They leverage the team’s shared expertise for its clients and draw on the team’s deep connections in the industry to help their clients succeed. The BSM Partners team is prepared for every challenge a business might face. From product development to replenishment, it is covered! BSM Partners’ services include research, consumer insights, product innovation, food safety and quality, regulatory, nutrition, veterinary, transformation, operations support, and engineering. With BSM Partners as part of the team, nothing is impossible!

The challenge

Consolidating pet food formulation databases with different nutrient orders, ingredient types, and informational categories can be a highly complicated process, requiring hundreds of hours and months to accomplish. The client needed to integrate their formulation database and ingredient data with BSM Partners' optimized formulation software. While the client’s formulation database had approximately 600 ingredients, access to the 700+ active, nutrient-verified ingredients in BSM Partners' database was needed to:

• Develop formulation strategies to provide immediate cost savings opportunities of more than $5 million annually.
• Identify existing and novel protein ingredients that could help the client provide premium pet food products during supply chain shortages and animal-based protein ingredient challenges.

The solution

BSM Partners' experts created a custom data processing pipeline tool, which reduced the time needed for data consolidation to less than an hour and removed the need for database downtime during business hours, eliminating any impact on business operations. This tool allowed for:

1. Important information such as nutrients, nutrient ratios, and ingredient types is to be collected from the client database.
2. BSM to set a new desired nutrient order or ingredient type to match BSM’s formulation software.
3. Immediate mapping of information from the client database to the correct placement in BSM Partners' formulation software without manual data entry.

The result

Through BSM Partners' data processing pipeline tool development, the client saw minimal retainer usage for a process normally taking hundreds of hours. Additionally, BSM was able to provide the client with cost savings opportunities exceeding $5 million annually on select formulas months ahead of the client’s expectations.

 

 

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About the Author

Corrine Harris Trevino formerly served as a Manager of Technical Services in the Product Innovation Group at BSM Partners. Outside of work, she can generally be found walking, training, and playing with her dogs or wrangling her flock of sheep after a daring escape. Corrine also declares a bias for the Cardigan Welsh Corgi, which she believes to be the superior of the two Corgi breeds.