New Integrated Solution Delivers the Goods for Boughey Distribution

Situation

Boughey Distribution began life in 1962 as a milk haulage business, delivering milk churns to local farms and dairies. Acquired by the NWF Group in 1971, Boughey now has a turnover of £18 million (U.S.$32 million), employs 300 staff, and is a leader in consolidated ambient grocery logistics.

With a growing customer base of over 100 customers, including such household names as Princes, Tesco, Sainsbury, and Safeway, the challenge facing Boughey always remains the same–to get the right product to the right place at the right time.

The sheer scale of operations at Boughey places huge demands on its IT systems. The company has extensive warehousing capacity for 50,000 ambient food pallets at its Nantwich site, with a further 12,000 at its sister site in Winsford. A fleet of 70 tractor units and 120 trailers deliver up to 100 loads to each regional distribution centre every day. Goods are received, inspected, re-packaged if required, stored, and then distributed according to customer requirements. This continual flow of orders and deliveries means the accuracy of real-time information, accessible anywhere in the business, is absolutely critical.

The system also manages delivery scheduling, incorporating specific customer requirements relating to bar coding or product configuration pre-dispatch. With the increasing automation of handling systems, an error can lead to a delivery being rejected if it fails to meet customer specifications. In addition, the system is responsible for ensuring load sequences for trailers are optimised against delivery routes. This generates a loading list which in turn drives the warehouse picking priorities required to ensure each load is dispatched in a timely manner.

Solution

Boughey's existing system contained two key weaknesses that were hampering its ability to fully realise operational potential. Firstly, using a management control system from a small vendor meant that customer and technical support was a scarce resource. This led to slow and expensive development costs whenever Boughey sought to evolve the system.

Keith Forster, Financial Director, Boughey Distribution, says, "We endured significant time and cost barriers to revising or developing the system to meet our customer and supplier changing demands."

Secondly, while Boughey referred to a generic 'system,' in reality it was a multitude of smaller systems with Sage driving the accounts and separate Microsoft® Access 2002 databases undertaking other tasks such as job costing, bookings, and vehicle management.

This could be quite testing, as Forster explains, "We faced the typical challenges associated with using disparate systems, principally revolving around the lack of integration hindering our ability to achieve real-time, plant-wide business visibility," he says. "We also wasted a lot of time having to re-enter information, which carried an inherent potential for human error."

Because Boughey's IT systems are central to its ability to maintain excellent customer and supplier relationships, the company began its search for a fully integrated system, finally settling on Microsoft Business Solutions—Axapta®, which fulfilled all its requirements, and provided the assurance it needed for business continuity.

As Forster recalls, "The inherent flexibility contained within Microsoft Axapta was exactly what we were looking for to meet our continually changing requirements," he explains. "In addition, it was backed by the solidity of Microsoft itself—if anything had happened to our old supplier, we simply wouldn't have any business. If we stop, shelves go empty in supermarkets."

The company selected Sense Enterprise Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner to undertake implementation. The project was completed in just three months.

"The implementation was remarkably pain free," comments Forster. "Although we have vastly refined our use of the system since then, the original implementation was achieved quickly, quietly, and without fuss."

Boughey's IT system is now much more robust and streamlined. With Microsoft Axapta at its heart, electronic data interchange (EDI) orders are received via COVAST and fed into Microsoft Axapta via Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2002. Microsoft Axapta has real-time two-way integration with the Manpack 3 planning system and the entire solution runs on Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server operating system.

Benefits

Greater Accuracy and Visibility

Today, Boughey has achieved much greater accuracy and visibility of information across every area of its business. Substantial time savings have been achieved from removal of unnecessary duplication of data entry and there is now a much greater sense of confidence in Boughey's ability to respond to customer demands.

Improved Customer Relations

Boughey is now able to proactively make recommendations and suggestions to its suppliers, further improving customer and supplier relationships and ensuring it achieves its goal of 99.5 per cent customer service level consistency.

For the future, Forster outlines how he sees the system ultimately evolving, "We will be able to offer real-time stock visibility to customers and even allow order entry via the internet. Downloading stock and order information on demand is an area that gets customers strangely excited and our ability to quickly meet whatever our customers require will become a major USP in developing our operation and adding value to the services we provide."

Positive Return on Investment

Although return on investment was not a priority, the company has also been positively rewarded in this area too, as Forster explains.

"Return on investment was never a key driver for us –we simply had to update our system and find a route to achieve our aims. It is almost an additional and unexpected benefit that we should achieve our return in investment within a year."

Microsoft Dynamics

Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systems your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship

and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.

For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to: