The challenge of supplying global markets came under scrutiny when Procter & Gamble’s Onofrio Caradonna opened the Supply Chain Conference in London this morning.
Caradonna, who is P&G’s Europe product supply shared services leader, focused on Global Distributor Markets, more remote markets where the company works through distributors.
He pointed out that the distributors are very good at selling but not always good at forecasting. As a result it was very difficult to manage inventory.
The start was a quick fix solution using spreadsheets but there were significant problems, and it quickly moved on to look at how to accelerate business growth by designing a more customer centric supply chain.
The Global Distributor Markets (GDM )Supply Chain Synchronisation involved enabling business growth by creating a compliant and synchronised global supply chain to serve customers
and consumers with a global portfolio, with the right quality, service and cost and cash, for P&G and its distributors.
It requires a big cultural change moving from customer service to customer-centric. Needed to redesign supply chain to focus on those things that customers want and need (and would be willing to pay for) to boost sales and profit.
Caradonna highlighted some of the achievements of this approach. In one example, he said it had been possible to cut 50 per cent in delivery time moving from sea containers to intermodal. This reduced customer inventory and increased their cash flow to invest in new categories launch.
And in another example, it had reduced the minimum quantity order which had enabled the distributor to eliminate expensive.
In the second session of the morning, Alex Watson, head of logistics – operations & fulfilment at Superdry, explained Superdry’s supply chain journey.
Superdry took the overall award at the 2018 Supply Chain Awards having progressively transformed its supply chain, driving innovation in the business to deliver competitive advantage.
He then went on to look forward at the challenges facing society as whole. He quoted futurologist Peter Diamandis on the power and implications of exponential change. He highlighted the importance of the move from physical into digital infrastructure that is already happening.
The Supply Chain Conference takes place in London on 19th and 20th March.
