22 SCS:THE EUROPEAN SUPPLY CHAIN EXCELLENCE AWARDS 2008 DECEMBER 2008 SUPPLY CHAIN STANDARD
www.supplychainstandard.com
Shortlisted
C&C Group
Coca-Cola Enterprises
Hero
Kimberly-Clark
Peter Surtees (centre
right), director, European
supply chain, and Jonathan
Preece (centre left),
manager of process
development at Kimberly-
Clark accept the FMCG/CPG
Award from ELA board
member and chairman of
ELUPEG, Alan Waller (far
right). Also pictured is host
for the evening Jeremy Vine.
FMCG/CPG Sponsored by The European Logistics Association
Winner
Kimberly-Clark
The Fast Moving Consumer Goods/Consumer
Packaged Goods category was hard fought this year
with four good entries from C&C Group, Coca-Cola
Enterprises, Hero and Kimberly-Clark.
Hero is a CHF 1.85bn nutritional food group with strong
brands in fruit, cereals and infant nutrition, operating in
over 30 countries. The company has successfully
implemented a Europe-wide, vendor-managed inventory
solution for chilled products and has put in place a webbased
platform that integrates forecasting, inventory
monitoring and production capacity planning.
C&C Group is a Tipperary-based drinks business with
strong brands in spirits and cider – many will recognise the
company’s Magners cider brand, for which a long
maturation process is required. The company has undergone
significant restructuring over the past 12 months to move
from a functional-based organisation, with two separate
companies operating the cider and spirits businesses, to a
dynamic customer-focused organisation with a supply chain
unit comprising manufacturing, distribution, human
resources, as well as IT integration and finance.
Both of these entries were good, but out of the four
entrants in this category Coca-Cola and Kimberly-Clark
stood out. Looking at the scope of the change that they
both made and the duration of the initiative, the cash-tocash
improvements, the performance levels they were
running at and the process skills involved, then it really
came down to these two.
Although the entry for Coca-Cola Enterprises centred on
the company’s North London operations, the supply chain
stretches across the UK, France, Belgium, Holland and
Luxembourg and reflects a continuous journey of
improvement made over the past decade to drive down costs
and improve service. In the past 18 months the company has
completed a massive transformational project by moving from
three separate supply chains for Europe to just one. Many
innovations undertaken at its North London operation are
now being rolled out in Europe, with key initiatives impacting
cash-to-cash cycle times and order fulfilment.
Kimberly-Clark too, has been active in bringing about
major transformations to its European supply chain. Over
the past 18 months the manufacturer of such well known
household brands as Andrex, Kleenex and Huggies, has
completed the roll out of its “100 per cent connected
enterprise strategy”, which has moved 1,250 stakeholders
(mainly customers and carriers) from a manual system of
transacting business to an electronically-based operation.
This has resulted in reduced errors, faster turnaround times
for customer orders and improvements to order
management and carrier management operations.
Kimberly-Clark’s approach was to use a common process
across the whole of Europe.
The company is highly customer
focused and its customer
segmentation leads to appropriate
and measured service levels.
Collaboration is at the heart of Kimberly-Clark’s supply
chain strategy and is based on building a credible customer
focused organisation that collaborates with its strategic
partners to create a differentiated service solution
appropriate to the customer. The network has been
designed to remove cost and complexity, and to improve
sustainability – driving perfect order connectivity across the
whole of the company’s European supply chain.
The judges concluded that: “These are both very good
supply chains, but these guys [Kimberly-Clark] really
understand their customers. The company is highly
customer-focused and its customer segmentation leads to
appropriate and measured service levels. The company has
implemented the connected enterprise system in the past
18 months and their planning and ordering processes
concern the whole of the European supply chain.” In
particular, the judges were impressed by the company’s
drive to build collaborative relationships with appropriate
consumer packaged goods partners to deliver supply chain
efficiencies, cost savings and sustainability improvements.
And for these reasons, Kimberly-Clark took away the award
for the FMCG/CPG category.
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