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August, 2010

The Consortium: Shortlisted for European Supply Chain Excellence Award

The Consortium will be amongst many prestigious companies at this year’s European Supply Chain Excellence Awards including Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, Virgin Media and Marks & Spencer. Mark W Barnett, Chief Operations Officer describes The Consortium as having innovation at its core “Innovation is delivered by our people – not only by investment in I.T. solutions or expensive consultancy, continuing to optimize our supply chain solutions and delivering the exceptional service we are known for, we continue to lead the way in our markets.”

That conviction has guided him and his team at The Consortium as they embarked on an ambitious and complex process of change in 2009 to further develop and enhance the company’s supply chain solutions, in order to support the future growth of the business.

Barnett describes the initiative as “incorporating lean and agile principles in our logistics model.” This evolved in late 2009 with the launch of a 3 year supply chain initiative called “Going for Gold” which was designed to “work in partnership with our supply base, raising the bar of customer service and supply chain excellence using innovative thinking and process management.” Three main innovations exist at the core of this initiative:

1. Moving from separate purchasing and product marketing teams to consolidated category management teams
2. Application of lean and agile approaches to supply chain solutions to both internal and external business operations
3. Launching 'Going for Gold' – a 3 year operational plan designed to step change customer service through effective collaboration with suppliers and innovative supply chain design

1. Category Management
A lot of planning and rigour went into restructuring into one unified category team. Barnett explains “The purpose of this structure is to seed a truly entrepreneurial approach to the future development of categories, with the consumer genuinely at its heart.”

2. “Supply Chain solutions can be found by adopting a lean and agile approach”
At the outset, a radical decision was made to approach the design of the process by considering what could be taken out in order to deliver more. In doing this, a critical element has been to apply leaner approaches to warehouse design, flow and clever use of storage facilities. With space at a premium a new supply channel was created called P2O (Purchase 2 Order). Barnett explains “we can continue to offer a next day delivery service to our customers, but without cash being tied up in stock holding. This allows greater agility in coping with rapidly changing ranges.”

3. Launching 'Going for Gold'
The goal was to find an innovative and engaging way to develop, design and communicate the plan which would motivate both staff and supply base to help step-change the business. Barnett explains that a similar approach to engage with both audiences was developed through a Mind Map approach which allowed the vision and goals to be visually communicated easily. Ultimately the diligence applied has paid off through each of these stages. By rethinking every part of the process, The Consortium team created a better, smarter supply chain process that sets a new reference point in its class for performance, agility and cost-effectiveness.

With these significant changes, The Consortium continues to push the limits and is already seeing the benefits. “It’s still early days,” continues Barnett “But since the launch in February, we are very encouraged by early results, despite operating in a tough market context.”

The awards take place on the 18th November at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London’s Mayfair. Last year’s winner was GlaxoSmithKline.