|
|
|
Tate & Lyle
EU Rules’ change prompts Distribution review at Tate & Lyle
Tate & Lyle is a world-leading manufacturer of renewable food and industrial ingredients, predominantly produced from corn and sugar cane. In its Sugars business, the company sells everything from sugar sachets, to 1kg bags of sugar, to 25kg bags used by small manufacturers, to drums of liquid sugar and syrups used by larger manufacturers, right up to full tankers of sugar for big manufacturers. For the UK and Europe, the distribution point for all of these is Tate & Lyle’s Thames refinery.
Tate & Lyle Sugars recently decided to review its distribution and appointed Davies & Robson to examine the distribution operations.
Davies & Robson specialists conducted a full review, identifying product flows and benchmarking movements in terms of service and cost, establishing the suitability and quality of current transport modes, equipment and routes, and the process paid.
The results of this high level review indicated areas where significant improvement was possible. As an immediate follow-on project, Davies & Robson was asked to look in greater detail at the UK distribution of packed goods to retailers and wholesalers.
This more detailed review resulted in a recommendation that, for packaged goods deliveries to UK retailers, Tate & Lyle should stop organising movements using one-off deals in the spot market (an approach that was resulting in fairly poor service levels) and appoint a specialist contractor with a multi-user network to handle all movements, with specific service level agreements. The approach, whereby core deliveries (full loads of the fastest moving products) would continue to be dispatched directly from Thames refinery but, everything classed as non-core (smaller deliveries and deliveries of mixed goods) would be handled by a specialist contractor, was agreed.
Tate & Lyle then asked Davies & Robson to run the tender process. Mark Rowlatt, Tate & Lyle’s head of supply chain, said: “Davies & Robson helped us to analyse our distribution issues and develop an optimum strategy, and ran an extremely professional tender process that resulted in the appointment of Bibby”.
www.tateandlyle.com
|