The client:
The client in this case study are a leading manufacturer of Food Products to the UK Foodservice sector. Based in the Heart of England, the client delivers nationally across the UK using its own fleet of vehicles as well as carrier distribution.
The business has grown significantly over the past decade to a point where the company delivers from its manufacturing base primary warehouse as well as secondary distribution points, where stock is held, and customer orders are delivered on local delivery vehicles.
The growth in the business had led to significant investments in fleet and distribution infrastructure for the organisation. Like any organisation undergoing a significant cost curve much of the development over recent times had been reactive to growth adding further capacity to meet new needs rather than taking a more holistic network-based approach.
The challenge:
The client needed to understand how best to optimally organise their supply chain physical infrastructure and their transport operations into the future. The team at ASCALi were engaged to initially conduct an outline assessment of opportunities to streamline the logistics network. The level of growth the business had experienced had been well managed and accommodated by the logistics team, but the senior leadership team of the business recognised that to continue the growth curve they needed to take stock of the current position and evaluate all the best options for delivering future success.
The business recognised the limitations in being able to evaluate their best options moving forward, hence the need to seek external expert support to add impartial vision and judgement to the ongoing high-quality logistics management process.
The approach:
The team from ASCALi Quickly and efficiently worked on 2 fronts:
Firstly, the ASCALi team set about building a logistics distribution cost evaluation model to demonstrate scope for operational improvement and changes to network structure. This entailed a highly detailed piece of data and modelling analysis initially using our transport modelling solution to establish real-world cost for delivering customer volumes for the business.
It was essential to conduct analysis at this level of detail as this firstly support and underpins any decisions or recommendations, but also adds significant value to the consideration of strategic network options.
Secondly, the team valuated operational processes and the ‘day in the life’ of the organisation to understand where there was scope to add value in terms of cost opportunity and service enhancement.
This process and operational review was drawn heavily from the decades of experience of the consulting team on the project. Building upon learnings from how this specific client delivers its product, with the specific challenges that entails, the team used their expertise in applying best practise recommendations to how the business could organise itself and physically manage the flow of product were key to this strand of activity.
In conjunction with the logistics network cost modelling, the team at ASCALi used its own proprietary software application, ASCALiNet® to establish the network choices open to the client to support effective business decision making about how and when any changes to the network and service centres should be made.
The outcome:
The ASCALi team Identified a suite of options available to the client to significantly improve the organisation and delivery of their logistics fulfilment solution. This included:
- Changes to network coverage areas, service days and regional distribution centre splits were evaluated with cost benefits presented clearly to the client to enable onward implementation, saving not only a significant % of operating cost, but for most customers, taking a day out of the order to delivery lead time;
- Changes to management and organisation to deliver a customer facing logistics solution with the right skills and attributes to support the businesses ongoing growth curve, leading to the formation of a new specialist technical solutions process within the business;
- Development of a cost-to-serve model to provide ongoing beneficial evaluation choices for the client to enable them to consider their commercial proposition and cost to distribute to individual customers;
- Detailed evaluation for the onboarding costs for a significant new key account customer to enable cost and service impact to be evaluated across the whole network;
- A clear plan of other systemic improvements to business systems functionality and specifically transport scheduling solutions to enable the business to make a step change from its manually controlled solution operation to a systemically driven lean, efficient transport optimisation process.
Overall the range of benefits available to the client from this project have been significant and have been delivered by the team at ASCALi within budget and beyond initial expectations.
You can read more about our ASCALiNet® Application here, or why not talk to ASCALi about how our experts and applications can help your organisation to streamline its logistics operations.