Route to Market & Supply Chain Blog

We already find ourselves at 17th January so not many days left to ensure your monthly top and bottom lines are on target. Good luck with that if your business (& body!) is only just shaking off the holiday excesses. What is top of mind? The sagging…

Chris Rea has finally found the correct turn off, a lot of people in Africa still don’t know its Christmas and the novelty Santa toilet seat cover is back in the box. Oh, and chocolate Easter eggs are in the shops 4 months in advance. Christmas and…

Christmas is coming around faster than ever and who better than Noddy Holder and Slade to celebrate Sales & Operational Planning (S&OP). This festive song has been heard at Christmas every year since 1973! If you have been living in a cave on a…

Dear Father Christmas,, I have been a very good FMCG CEO this year, I promise. If you want, you can check with my colleagues and shareholders. They know how good I have been this year. Apart from the out of stocks of course, oh and the little…

“Dashing through the snow In a one horse open sleigh…” How many of you started to sing then? Yes, the festive period is fast approaching and the biggest and best supply chain in the world is almost ready to activate. This is always the most…

Ok, so you are unlikley to see this on a car bumper sticker but FMCG Distributors will have a significant impact on your sales performance, probably your variable pay bonus and therefore your CEO aspirations! How have you treated your Distributors…

Hooray! Many supermarket chains now sell imperfect or misshapen fruit and vegetables at a discount. As you may know I am a big fan of buying this type of food as taste has nothing to do with shape based on my massive culinary knowledge. Whether my…

The definition of celebrity is a famous person, VIP, very important person, personality, name, big name, famous name, household name, star, superstar, celebutante, leading light, giant, great, master, guru. In that case why do I only know 3 people…

How is 2017 going so far? Are you in cruise control or is your business chaos central? Be honest now! The last quarter of the year is always difficult to manage in order to achieve 2017 results without negatively impacting 2018. When your business…

Some things never change and FMCG 4th Quarter challenges certainly do not. The same challenges are clearly present and what is astonishing is that some companies are still making short term, expensive efforts to “make the sales numbers”. I don't…

There is no excuse in visiting IKEA on a Sunday before watching 22 millionaires with daft hair styles kick a football around on live telly. The weather was cold and the air was full of autumn drizzle and as I turned into the car park the scale of…

Extra SKUs sneak onto price lists when nobody is looking. Sales & Marketing colleagues prefer new launches with lengthy SKU lists different flavours, different sizes, different colours, new packaging etc. How many shelf facings do they want? How do…

I have spent some considerable time visiting medical facilities both at home and in UK and in the latter case I was not impressed. The National Health Service is still the envy of the rest of the world and rightly so. When you consider the policies…

You have great brands and brand awareness, a fantastic internal supply chain, tight financial control, top class HR, a top-notch sales force, innovative marketing - surely a recipe for success in CEE? Surely this must be the case? Sadly, not always…

Picture the scene in many a brewing boardroom; a terse note has arrived from the suits at HQ telling the boss to urgently reduce costs as the year-end result is not going to look pretty. Why do all the board directors then look silently at their…