Download PDF
Building Supply Chain Visibility
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Warehouse & Inventory Management
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Warehouse Automation
Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
B&Q, a major retail brand under Kingfisher plc, operates 359 stores in the UK and Ireland, offering more than 40,000 products. To support its retail program, B&Q needed to transform its logistics function, replacing its manual, mainly paper-based legacy systems, which were no longer suitable for a business that serves more than 150 million customers a year. This required a flexible warehouse management solution (WMS) to provide real-time information. B&Q wanted to ensure a seamless transition of IT functionality across a network that had been established for 15 years, and needed a solution that would provide it with the ability to manage more than 100,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) across its sites, integrate stock supplied by approximately 600 different vendors, improve inventory accuracy with real-time information and clear visibility of orders, manage cross-dock and flow through platforms, and consolidate and pick stock for each store, which is dispatched daily via 500 trailer loads carrying around 45 pallets of products.
About The Customer
B&Q is a major retail brand in the United Kingdom and Ireland, operating 359 stores with more than 40,000 products all under one roof. B&Q is one of the main retail brands under Kingfisher plc, Europe’s leading home improvement retail group. B&Q strives to offer everything its customers need to successfully achieve their home improvement and do-it-yourself (DIY) projects. More than three million customers walk through B&Q’s doors every week. To support its retail program, B&Q needed to transform its logistics function, replacing its manual, mainly paper-based legacy systems, which were no longer suitable for a business that serves more than 150 million customers a year.
The Solution
B&Q chose to implement JDA Warehouse Management, part of JDA’s Intelligent Fulfillment™ suite, to five regional consolidation centers that each service between 50 and 100 stores. It is now being rolled out to three distribution centers (DCs). By implementing JDA Warehouse Management, B&Q is reducing costs across its network of three DCs and five regional consolidation centers, ensuring high stock accuracy and improving product availability at its UK stores. With JDA Warehouse Management, B&Q has completely eliminated the previous paper-based system, including all vendor paperwork. The project began in 2008, after B&Q undertook a major review of its supply chain and, with the support of JDA consultants, included six months of process mapping across the consolidation center and DCs. A team of 25 B&Q operatives was recruited to gain a clear understanding of how each site operated and identify potential issues.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Improving Production Line Efficiency with Ethernet Micro RTU Controller
Moxa was asked to provide a connectivity solution for one of the world's leading cosmetics companies. This multinational corporation, with retail presence in 130 countries, 23 global braches, and over 66,000 employees, sought to improve the efficiency of their production process by migrating from manual monitoring to an automatic productivity monitoring system. The production line was being monitored by ABB Real-TPI, a factory information system that offers data collection and analysis to improve plant efficiency. Due to software limitations, the customer needed an OPC server and a corresponding I/O solution to collect data from additional sensor devices for the Real-TPI system. The goal is to enable the factory information system to more thoroughly collect data from every corner of the production line. This will improve its ability to measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and translate into increased production efficiencies. System Requirements • Instant status updates while still consuming minimal bandwidth to relieve strain on limited factory networks • Interoperable with ABB Real-TPI • Small form factor appropriate for deployment where space is scarce • Remote software management and configuration to simplify operations
Case Study
How Sirqul’s IoT Platform is Crafting Carrefour’s New In-Store Experiences
Carrefour Taiwan’s goal is to be completely digital by end of 2018. Out-dated manual methods for analysis and assumptions limited Carrefour’s ability to change the customer experience and were void of real-time decision-making capabilities. Rather than relying solely on sales data, assumptions, and disparate systems, Carrefour Taiwan’s CEO led an initiative to find a connected IoT solution that could give the team the ability to make real-time changes and more informed decisions. Prior to implementing, Carrefour struggled to address their conversion rates and did not have the proper insights into the customer decision-making process nor how to make an immediate impact without losing customer confidence.
Case Study
Digital Retail Security Solutions
Sennco wanted to help its retail customers increase sales and profits by developing an innovative alarm system as opposed to conventional connected alarms that are permanently tethered to display products. These traditional security systems were cumbersome and intrusive to the customer shopping experience. Additionally, they provided no useful data or analytics.
Case Study
Ensures Cold Milk in Your Supermarket
As of 2014, AK-Centralen has over 1,500 Danish supermarkets equipped, and utilizes 16 operators, and is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. AK-Centralen needed the ability to monitor the cooling alarms from around the country, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each and every time the door to a milk cooler or a freezer does not close properly, an alarm goes off on a computer screen in a control building in southwestern Odense. This type of alarm will go off approximately 140,000 times per year, equating to roughly 400 alarms in a 24-hour period. Should an alarm go off, then there is only a limited amount of time to act before dairy products or frozen pizza must be disposed of, and this type of waste can quickly start to cost a supermarket a great deal of money.
Case Study
Supermarket Energy Savings
The client had previously deployed a one-meter-per-store monitoring program. Given the manner in which energy consumption changes with external temperature, hour of the day, day of week and month of year, a single meter solution lacked the ability to detect the difference between a true problem and a changing store environment. Most importantly, a single meter solution could never identify root cause of energy consumption changes. This approach never reduced the number of truck-rolls or man-hours required to find and resolve issues.