Manufacturing & Supply Chain | End-to-End Profitability Optimisation
Natural-language AI scheduling across production lines
Reduction in total supply chain cost
About
Summit Manufacturing Group is a vertically integrated manufacturer operating across production, procurement, logistics, and sales functions. Having grown through acquisition and organic expansion, the group had accumulated a legacy of operational silos — each function running its own planning cycle, its own data systems, and its own definition of success. The result was a business where every function could demonstrate local performance while overall profitability quietly eroded.
Industry
Manufacturing & Supply Chain | End-to-End Profitability Optimisation
Company size
5,000 – 10,000 employees
Founded
1985
The Company
A vertically integrated business optimising the wrong things
Summit Manufacturing Group is a vertically integrated manufacturer operating across production, procurement, logistics, and sales functions. The group had grown through acquisition and organic expansion, leaving a legacy of operational silos — each function running its own planning cycle, with its own data systems and its own definition of success.
Production optimised for throughput. Logistics optimised for cost per unit. Sales optimised for top-line revenue. Finance optimised for margin. None of them were optimising for the same thing — and no one had the analytical infrastructure to show what the cost of that misalignment was.
The challenge
Local optimisation creating global underperformance
The siloed optimisation approach was generating decisions that were locally rational but globally suboptimal. Production would run large batches to maximise throughput and minimise per-unit manufacturing cost — but the resulting inventory build-up increased warehousing costs and, for perishable categories, write-off risk. Logistics would select the cheapest carrier — but delivery performance on that carrier was creating customer service failures that affected repeat business.
Sales would accept large orders at thin margins to hit volume targets — without visibility into the supply chain cost of servicing those accounts. The result was a business where every function could demonstrate it was performing well against its own metrics while overall profitability was eroding.
Leadership suspected the problem but lacked the analytical infrastructure to diagnose it or quantify the interventions that would fix it. The monthly executive reporting cycle consolidated four separate functional reports — each measuring success differently, none of them providing a view of whole-business profitability.
The Solution
A unified supply chain profitability model with cross-functional optimisation
Seven Billion built a unified supply chain profitability model that brought production, logistics, inventory, and sales data into a single analytical framework — and then applied optimisation techniques to identify the set of decisions across all functions that would maximise total profitability rather than individual function metrics.
The technical approach used Gurobi to formulate a large-scale Mixed Integer Programming problem that simultaneously optimised: production batch sizing and scheduling, balancing throughput efficiency against inventory carrying cost and perishability risk; distribution network design, optimising allocation of finished goods to warehouses and selection of delivery routes based on total cost including service performance; customer and order profitability, incorporating the full supply chain cost of servicing each customer into the pricing and acceptance decision; and inventory positioning, determining optimal stock levels at each point in the network based on demand uncertainty and service level requirements.
Power BI was used to build the reporting layer, giving each functional head a view of performance that incorporated cross-functional cost allocation — allowing them to see, for the first time, the full cost impact of their decisions on the business as a whole.
The Results
14% profitability improvement and a cross-functional culture shift
Overall profitability increased by 14% in the first full year following implementation — equivalent to Rs. 4.2 Cr in annual value — through the combined effect of production cost reduction, logistics network optimisation, and the elimination of margin-dilutive customer and order patterns.
Total supply chain cost reduced by 9% as the optimisation model identified inefficiencies in the distribution network and inventory positioning that were invisible in the siloed data environment. Cross-functional collaboration improved measurably — weekly cross-functional reviews shifted from dispute resolution to joint planning.
The monthly executive reporting cycle — previously a consolidation of four separate functional reports — was replaced by a single integrated profitability dashboard giving leadership real-time visibility into the key drivers of business performance. The change was both analytical and cultural: functions that had previously optimised independently now shared a common framework for understanding the consequences of their decisions.
The integrated profitability model did not just find savings — it changed how our leadership team thinks about the business. We make decisions differently now, and the margin improvement is the proof.
Group CEO, Summit Manufacturing Group
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