Route to Market & Supply Chain Blog

From personal experience I know how difficult it can be to enable sustainable change in the extended Supply Chain. Communicating change is hard enough but actually seeing it happen and being maintained is a tough task for most companies. Even though…

When you are absorbed in a competitive fast moving consumer goods business there is never a good time to take holidays. Those long awaited training courses always appear on the agenda at a critical launch period or at a difficult month or quarter…

That time of year is upon us once again. This 2 week period usually guarantees rain in UK when the only relief could be an impossibly wrinkle-free and young-looking Cliff Richard leading the communal singing during the delays. “Oohs” and “aahs” and…

The sun is out and the sky is blue so what drink waits for you? Beer producers rely on the sun to drive sales and produce a distinct pull along the supply chain but how many will win the market place battle? Certainly, if they are not ready for the…

Cue the famously ominous theme music, "Approaching Menace" by the British composer Neil Richardson. A hushed, shadowy, darkened studio. Contestant number one leaves his competitors in the dark and walks in a moving beam of light to the famous black…

When a company asks me to take a look at their S&OP process yet boasts a Forecast Accuracy (FA) of 98%, alarm bells are immediately sound. If you are at a genuine level of 98% then of course there is a little more incremental improvement possible…

Do you find yellow dog biscuits stuffed in your window frames? Well, I’d expect such occurrences to be as rare as a squirrel with a nut allergy but I find it all the time. The house in Romania has mosquito nets on the windows as the summers are…

Do you agree that Supply Chains seem to evolve very, very slowly? I cannot recall any major ground-breaking innovation in recent times. Yes, we have had bar-coding, RFID and S&OP etc but nothing that sticks out as significant or a major leap…

You have completed your weekly shop at one of the well-known International Key Accounts (IKA). Pushing your trolley around the well stocked aisles you selected what you needed and piled up the goodies. A full trolley this week as there were several…

During the summer months I am partial to a pint of the foaming ale with a solid, woody name like Woods Quaff served from a hand-pulled pump. Add a bag of pork scratchings and a village green cricket match and there you have what would approach the…

Is your Route To Market (RTM) network sluggish? Does your system frequently stall and cause frustration? Sales performance not going to plan? Competitors streaking ahead of you? Is your boss at Corporate HQ giving you a rough time? What can you do?…

For people of a certain age from the UK the high calorie, nutty chocolate bar in a brown-blue-yellow wrapper made by Mars Inc will always be a Marathon (before you ask, the USA Marathon was a Curly-Wurly type product). Snickers just does not work…

I took a look at how technology has changed the way Supply Chains work in a previous blog. During my recent trip to foreign parts – yes, Birkenhead and most of UK is foreign to me now – I saw modern technology in action like I have never seen before…

When I was managing an FMCG factory in Saudi Arabia one of the most frustrating challenges was the lack of factory capability understanding of Sales & Marketing colleagues and some detached Board members. People who have never worked in factories…

I spent Easter in UK suffering the bitter cold, visiting the heiress and once more watching Tranmere Rovers lose live. Whether on TV or in person I have not seen them win for several years now so I am developing a jinx complex. This season they have…