“Retailers are more extensively using testing, especially earlier stage testing; increasing third party auditing; widening the amount of direct suppliers they use; improving intelligence and increasing transparency to provide consumers with more information”
management system in place to ensure that their suppliers meet the companies’ code of conduct for supply chains and are required to provide evidence of compliance through the use of Sedex, the largest collaborative platform for sharing ethical supply chain data. QUEST has been in place since the early 1990’s and in that time has considerably changed and been updated to reflect the changing requirements of the business. The other data tool, Quality Management Tool (QMT) is a Kingfisher Group tool that works in a similar fashion
to the QUEST process for B&Q but applies to the Kingfisher group as a whole. It consists of various elements that look at supplier and/or product attributes, including quality elements, REACH, timber (EUTR), and packaging, for example. As a group tool it allows the various parts of the Kingfisher Group of companies to share information on commonly sourced products and to reduce duplication of effort. It is a modular system which allows for individual Group companies to integrate it into their existing systems as appropriate.
Multi-channel demands Michael Latimer, vice president of UK supply chain solutions company, Atlas says regardless of recent incidents, the last two to three years has seen retailers “looking more and more for flexible real-time visibility in the way they communicate”. This is largely down to retailers becoming more multi-channel with “huge shifts to online”, he believes. Retailers have previously relied on Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) with some sort of web portal or business process tool kit, says Atlas. Typically, each technology opportunity has been identified separately, acquired from different vendors and operated in isolation. Times are changing however, with increasing demands on retailers which require more sophisticated tools. Many retailers, for example, are buying from larger supply catalogues which require sophisticated stock optimisation tools; one of Atlas’ clients, a major global non-food retailer, has a catalogue of 1.5 million options.
Another retail trend is growing interoperability, in other words “a willingness to work with other service providers,” says Latimer. As the supply chain becomes more complicated, increasing demands on both retailers and suppliers, retailers have needed to embrace new working solutions to “save money, reducing paper and thinking about the environment,” says Latimer.
Atlas recently signed a contract with SPAR wholesaler Appleby Westward, to use the company’s ‘Universal’ solution. Appleby Westward Group currently serves 290 SPAR stores in the UK. SPAR records 12 million transactions a week throughout its stores across the UK. Latimer says: “The decision shows that the fully modular Atlas Universal solution allows complex businesses to combine cloud based portals, invoice matching and more traditional EDI into one easy to manage solution - allowing for seamless control of the entire supplier order and invoice process.” Larger, more global supply chains and product ranges, coupled with economic and environmental concerns are putting huge pressures on retailers. Luckily a wave of technology has been, and is being, unleashed to alleviate this that should save time, money and help the environment.
JUNE 2013 | RETAIL ENVIRONMENT 31
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