Route to Market & Supply Chain Blog

Well, what a year it has been. As 2020 stutters and stumbles to the end we all need to think about how our Supply Chains will operate in 2021 and beyond. Just like those old school photographs, your steady-state, stable 2018 set-up has gone and will…

Now that one of the new Covid19 vaccines (Pfizer BioNTech's mRNA vaccine) has been approved by a regulatory authority (UK's MHRA on 2 December 2020), attention turns to how to vaccinate the UK and the world. It is important not to underestimate the…

Understanding the Total Cost to Serve our customers is an essential element to any Route to Market (RtM) Strategy. As FMCG professionals, we need to understand how much it costs us to service our customers. It is also not as simple as it sounds. Why…

There are many ways to link all the different planning activities in your FMCG/Pharma company. This could be done with one single tool like the SAP Advanced Planning Optimiser or a host of other tools and packages. As with all IT youneed to know how…

When I first came across Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) I was sceptical of yet another ”blue sky” approach to pursuing manufacturing excellence. Surely, this would soon be replaced by the next set of buzz-word initials dreamed up by sharp-suited…

I started my career as an R&D type who helped bring new FMCG products to the market. Nobody really knew how a product made the transition from bench top and pilot plant testing to the supermarket shelves. Somebody must have been involved somewhere…

Rather a lot of blogging going on around the area of Digital Supply Chain and Analytics at present. Amongst all the serious stuff I thought it about time we took a well-earned break and enjoyed a bit of Supply Chain Comic Relief. A very catchy tune…

There is your dilemma. You need to save cash towards an expensive year-end holiday but you really do not know the best place from where to take the money. Do you take it from your day to day current account which is already set up to pay the routine…

I am often asked which job in the extended Supply Chain is the most important. For FMCG producers this may be the demand planner while for retail partners the key role could be innovation planning. I do have a view on this so park the question for…

If you do not specifically agree on what is expected between two parties before you start a relationship then anything and everything but success is likely. You buy a new car and you get a contract that tells you what is covered by the guarantee and…

Another sign of getting old I guess. When was the last time you watched a football match when no tattoos were on show and the haircuts did not look like something out of the Time Warp musical? As I write England is still involved yet we are all…

Some time ago I wrote about the way spreadsheets were undermining expensively assembled ERP’s in FMCG, Brewing and Pharmaceutical companies. They still are, by the way. Not too long ago a paper on Public Debt and Austerity published by 2 eminent…

Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise, Abbott and Costello, Little and Large, Hale and Pace, May and Johnson. These are examples of double acts where one party plays the straight/stooge and apparently serious man while the other plays the…

I have just had one of those mornings. I missed the alarm and the 10-minute snooze and from then on everything went downhill. Jumped in the shower for a brief cleanse but then I realised there was no soap, not even a sliver. So, soaking wet I get…

Over the years I have seen many strange sights on various forms of transport. In the Middle East I sat next to a vicious looking falcon on a flight to Bahrain. The falcon was extremely well behaved but then again so was I! In Africa a guy jumped on…