Food logistics: Store friendly delivery with lowest cost per case
Consumers today demand fresh, high-quality products and a high service level. This puts a lot of challenges on food retailers and manufacturers:
- Short lead times triggered by point of sale information (Efficient Consumer Response)
- More frequent deliveries of generally smaller orders
- High delivery reliability
- The ability to handle peaks in the stores and the DCs efficiently
Low margins make it necessary to reduce cost per case handled and improve downstream efficiency. Store friendly delivery can significantly reduce supply chain costs and enhance service levels to stores. We can help you to optimise your food logistics operation. We have already designed and implemented automated warehouses for well-known food manufacturers and retailers, such as Tesco, LeClerc, Micarna, PLUS Retail, Bart’s Retail, Casaventa and Colruyt. To give you an impression what we can do for Food companies:
Tesco, one of the UK's leading food retailers, has taken a major step forward in handling the picking and delivery of groceries ordered via the Tesco.com website by building a dedicated Dot Com facility. A material handling system was implemented to handle the order consolidation process and the release and sortation of the consolidated orders to the delivery vans. It is proving to have a quick payback time in freeing up expensive retail sales space in existing superstores and enabling faster growth of Dotcom sales. Other benefits include improved accuracy, traceability and a reduction in product damage.
LeClerc, one of the largest retail chains in France, handles fresh products such as fruit, vegetables, dairy products and meat in a temperature controlled environment. LeClerc uses a cross-docking system, which implies products are not held in stock, but are transshipped directly to shops. This gets products to customers faster, reduces manual labour by 50%, ensures 100% correct deliveries and triples the throughput per m2 in the warehouse.
Micarna, part of Migros, supplies all Migros stores in Switzerland with fresh meat and meat products. The warehouse is highly automated. Automatic picking of full totes with 8 QUICKSTORE miniloads ensures a highly efficient process. Partially full totes are picked manually according to a goods-to-man concept and joined with the full totes for shipping to stores. Micarna is very pleased with 35% lower manual work, highly efficient use of space and much more pleasant working conditions for its employees.
PLUS Retail is a prominent food retailer in the Netherlands. For their national DC, delivering 278 stores, they selected a system, in which two order picking strategies for slow moving items (goods-to-man and zone picking) are combined into a single, integrated system. This has improved accuracy (99,99%), improved service level to shops, because of family grouping functionality and reduced costs.