Route to Market & Supply Chain Blog

If you still rely on Traditional Trade (TT) distribution for a significant part of your business then read on! Over-stocking Distributors happens by stealth and the consequences creep up on you until suddenly and without warning you hit a brick wall…

Is the market getting any better, really? Many big name companies have announced indifferent Q4/Christmas results recently and all caution about the continuing "difficult market conditions”. Ok, so 2014 has been put to bed financially but many will…

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein How many of you will be reaching for an electric cigarette or giving up smoking altogether for the New Year? How long will it be before visits to the…

Dear Santa, I have been a very good FMCG CEO this year, I promise. If you want, you can check with my shareholders. They know how good I have been this year. Apart from the out of stocks of course, oh and the little mistake where we had to write…

I suppose it’s inevitable with age. Everything starts to fall apart eventually and it is amazing how it creeps up on you. You remember giggling silently when someone of a certain age walked in to a room and could not remember why or what they are…

The summer of 2004. It was 3 weeks after I had changed the job and the company. It was a new (Supply Chain) position in an FMCG company with many people speaking native French. At that time, the mayor of Bucharest- the future Romanian president…

The United States of America, the US of A, Uncle Sam and the land of the three. No, not a typo but three visits to USA by yours truly, that is. Two for business and one for pleasure but you cannot visit there without having fun even if it is after a…

My colleague Stefan Cucu recently wrote on the subject of stock shrinkage in coolers located in HORECA outlets in Romania. One of the points he made warned Supply Chain professionals about the likelihood of stock shrinkage anywhere along the chain.…

Today we see a lot of writing about Supply Chain. Technology is advancing rapidly and we are seeing changes almost on a daily basis; progress is simply enormous. However, some things never change and this is what I discuss here – things that never…

The 2014 Football World Cup in Brazil is fast approaching, yes it is football not soccer. As a kid you played “footy” where I grew up and if you said anything like “soccy” you would need to be a fast runner. The England team has completed missing…

Quite a bit of travel recently with a trip in each of the last three weeks. Regular readers will be aware I do not particularly like flying these days, not out of fear but simply the hassle of getting onto a plane. I am now down to simple trainers,…

FMCG and Brewing producers amongst many others, carefully pack their products to meet exacting requirements for International Key Account (IKA) and Local Key Account (LKA) customers. Increasingly this includes specially collated and shrink-wrapped…

In my previous two blogs on the subject, I outlined how producers (manufacturers) can achieve very significant improvements in the financial performance of their supply chains by a process of integration between the primary and secondary supply…

Enchange has been working with many FMCG and Pharmaceuticals multinationals for years on projects to improve their primary supply chains. We have also been working with many of the same companies on Route to Market (RTM) projects. For the sake of…

I will not reveal the name of the organisation for obvious reasons but their Supply Chain is one very impressive, slick machine. Across the Source, Plan, Make and Deliver Supply Chain disciplines we can see excellence and leading edge systems and…