Whitbread
"Within a few weeks it felt like we’d been using it for years, It’s hard to believe we ever used paper. For the staff it’s not about productivity but how much easier it is to do their work."
Whitbread Supply Chain Logistics provides the logistics services to a range of well known Whitbread operated names in retail catering and leisure. These include Brewer’s Fayre, Beefeater, TGI Friday’s, Costa Coffee and Premier Travel Inn.
The Chess system originally included WMS and sales and purchase order processing to control two cold store warehouses at Salford and Reading, dispatching over 25 million cases of product per year. The system was then upgraded to utilize the latest in RF technology, including up to 60 voice terminals used in Whitbread’s 24 hour picking operation.
Whitbread identified that the delivery process would benefit from an electronic delivery management process, offering greater visibility of progress made on delivery routes day to day but also providing a digital record of orders and deliveries. The Delivery Connect solution supplied by Blackbay was integrated with the Chess system in order to flow digital information between driver and depot, via mobile devices.
Not only does the new system improve delivery accuracy and enable Whitbread to resolve problems ‘on the spot’, it also cuts down paperwork and ensures a full audit trail is visible for each route.
