Matalan - Meeting Customer Requirements
Advanced is one of the UK’s leading garment processor and retail logistics companies. As a partner to its customers, Advanced delivers perfectly presented merchandise to the right place at the right time, thereby maximising sales for the retailer. Advanced provides a comprehensive range of pre-retail garment processing services to deal with every planned, and often unplanned supply chain requirement.
The Requirements
To provide a purpose built state of the art processing site at Holmfield capable of being expanded from an initial requirement of 10,000,000 units up to 20,000,000 units as and when the customer required. The customer is this case is Matalan. The challenges involved were to meet the following customer specifications to a very tight timescale:
- To have capacity online within 3 months of agreement from a standing start.
- Improve the quality of the processing.
- Reduce prices.
- Reduce other ancillary costs (transport, customers DC costs, customer’s administration costs).
- Increase reliability of throughput times.
- Provide a significant low cost storage facility.
- Improve visibility of audit trail.
The Proposed Solution
To achieve these objectives Advanced sourced equipment and know-how from throughout Europe and installed the best quality equipment available. This was linked to Advanced’s existing IT systems to allow for reduced administration and consistency of product quality.
The technology was also chosen to allow for linking to the customers IT systems to facilitate future gains – such as low cost picking, pre-allocation of stock, and call off systems.
Below is a Gantt chart showing the projected implementation plan for the Holmfield site.
The Result
Advanced achieved the desired result and the site opened for business 2 nd September 2002 at 50% capacity. 100% capacity was available from mid October 2002. By Jan 2003 the site was fully operational, productivities were good, quality is high and Matalan were totally satisfied.
This result showed Advanced was able to react to an emergency situation and get a complex site operational in 3 months.
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