Tesco

• Goods receiving process at retail warehouses and DC’s in Central Europe were managed by basic spreadsheet-based tools
• No central system, several country specific solutions with a complicated approach for suppliers and their carriers:
• Poor visibility for carriers on the length of time trucks would need to wait for unloading at the DC
  • Hard for carriers to plan additional deliveries or optimise truck utilisation
• Difficult to manage capacity plan due to the existing  approach
• Movement of operations from a country specific to a central  management structure
• Due to fixed delivery slots, it was hard for TESCO to allocate warehouse personnel efficiently:
  • Suppliers/Carriers could not always meet the fixed delivery slots they were given.
  • Around 40 percent of trucks arrived on site before the scheduled time in the hope of catching an earlier slot.
• Existing approach was not able to support promotion-driven, sudden peaks in demand:
  • Suppliers often found it hard to get the slots they needed to deliver extra goods at short notice.

Since 2014 TESCO has been managing the inbound goods processes at its distribution centres using the slot management of MERCAREON. This allows clear, accurate and trustworthy information. Carriers are much more likely to comply with the scheduled time-slot. The improved internal operations’ planning makes it easier for the retailer to ensure that warehouse personnel are available to unload trucks as they arrive.