Supply Chain

We bring decades of demonstrated industry experience as well as consulting expertise to businesses to identify and develop the most optimal and fit for purpose supply chain strategy and operating model that supports your customer promise and your organisation’s business strategy.

We start by understanding the demands your customers place on your business - lead times, order frequency, inventory targets – and review your current network structures, supply chains processes and vendor relationships to determine how your supply chain should be set up to perform at its best

To effectively manage your service to customers as well as manage your cost base efficiently it’s imperative that your network design supports these things. In fact, not having your network set up correctly will prohibit you from ever achieving these goals

In order to arrive at the optimal network design and determine how many and where your DCs should be located we consider the following:

• Your customer promise

• Channels you service

• Volumes across states

• Centre of gravity analysis

• Warehouse rates by state

• Freight rates and capacity by state and optimisation opportunities inherently available via multiple network scenarios

Our supply chain diagnostics analyses your business’ current supply chain performance and broader capability.

Rarely do businesses fully understand their cost-to-serve. Which customers are profitable, which SKUs are unprofitable and which sales channels are the most profitable are questions all businesses grapple with. Our cost-to-serve analysis allows businesses to understand their costs and profitability at a granular level, and use this to inform key investment, pricing, supply chain and commercial decisions

We have deep freight market expertise from more than 25 freight sourcing projects over the past 3 years. We not only source the best rates, but review your freight practices at the same time to ensure all value levers are pulled. Through the final stages of negotiation we ensure the best commercial construct is put in place to lock in identified and delivered benefits

Businesses are inclined to assess their freight spend only from a commercial rate perspective, however our experience across multiple industries, tells us that significant value exists in exploring optimisation opportunities that exist across improved planning, asset utilisation and route optimisation

Optimisation opportunities we explore are:

• Network optimisation – optimal freight and warehouse mix

• Asset utilisation – cube and mass

• Mode selection

• Backload opportunities

• Asset allocation

• Routing and scheduling

Having a clear demand signal that is a consensus number across all functions that is in the right units of measure and in the correct time buckets is critical to ensuring not only customer satisfaction but also avoiding high levels of noise and volatility within your operations

We can help in the following ways:

• Develop a robust categorisation of all demand items

• Product lifecycle management:

• New product introduction:

• End-of-life management

• Assessment and benchmarking

• Demand planning management:

• Cross-functional engagement, forecast consensus management, strong accountability and clear measurement.

With increased demand from customers and shrinking tolerance times, businesses need teams to remain agile and responsive. This can be particularly daunting when costs and capacity pressure from within businesses are taken into consideration. Our team has solved this dilemma on numerous occasions by:

• Developing strategies to reduce the bullwhip effect.

• Generating clear cost and service indicators.

• Integrating with core service schedules.

• Establishing robust and integrated collaboration across supply functions.

• Driving metric alignment with balanced scorecards.

• Performing policy reviews, optimisation and end-to-end establishment.

• Focusing on supplier integration and supply management through technology, process, and change management.

Think of inventory as cash… because it is! Now with this in mind, how effectively are you managing your cash?

Inventory is often an outcome of many other decisions, and we help you ensure each of these decisions are made with clear understanding of their impacts on inventory

We assist by:

• Firstly, developing and building metrics with your data on your company’s inventory performance

• Conduct a health check on your inventory and identify what’s causing the unsatisfactory result

• We identify what quick wins you can take to make an immediate commercial impact

• Perform root cause analysis to identify the reasons for high levels of stock coverage, excess stock in the wrong locations or SLOB stock

• Develop plans to address these issues

• Develop an inventory policy that outlines the governance process as to how inventory can be bought and to what levels, ensuring that your inventory is always maintained at pre-determined levels