Accantia

Accantia Distribution Gains Optimum Benefit

Davies & Robson has been a logistics consultancy provider to Accantia Health and Beauty Limited, the manufacturer of leading personal care brands Simple and Lil-lets, since July 2000.

Accantia, as a lean organisation, has recognised that it will not fully require a traditional Contract Manager, or indeed be able to develop ’in house’ all the specialist skills needed to gain optimum benefit from this outsourced arrangement.

The Accantia Third Party contract is activity based and, as such, opportunity exists to identify the exact drivers of costs in order to reduce them or gain additional benefit without loss of service.

Davies & Robson now provides ongoing activity analysis. Product and order data is electronically communicated to Davies & Robson from two sources: Accantia’s own ERP system, and Contractor’s ‘pick and deliver’ data used to support their invoices on a monthly basis.

Using a specially created program to analyse the data, the Davies & Robson team is able to validate charges and delivery methodologies, and feedback valuable information to guide future improvements to both the client and the contractor.

So sophisticated is the program that the potential savings identified from the first period’s analysis were in excess of the annual cost of the service to Accantia. The program has been used to aid factory gate pricing negotiations, forecasting/budgeting and breaking down the cost of servicing different customers, and undertake ‘what if’ effects of changes in the way that products are packaged and delivered.

John Greene, Supply Chain and IT Director at Accantia, has said of the Davies & Robson support service “The vetting, analysis and interpretation of the activity based information is invaluable in highlighting the drivers of costs in a dynamic area”.

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