The annual Efficient Consumer Response Australasia (ECRA) Supplier and Retailer Convention brings together leaders from across the Food, Beverage and Grocery industry locally and globally to examine, discuss and debate the key issues impacting our industry.

Retailers, suppliers and manufacturers face extraordinary challenges as they search for innovative ways to thrive in a turbulent marketplace.  With unsteady consumer confidence, shifting shopper demands, pressure on margins and increasing competition for shopper loyalty, there is greater need to collaborate to drive value through the supply chain and stimulate sales.

Visit the convention page here for further details.

Winning in January 2013 - Report Available Now

Australasian retailers Woolworths/Progressive and Coles have again provided ECRA with outbound service level data following Christmas 2012 and January 2013 to facilitate an industry report into this on-shelf availability performance indicator.

The report for January 2013 can be order via the ECRA website here. 

In summary, 2012-13 saw a mixed bag in OBSL performance - whilst some categories have improved performance greatly over past years, for others there continues to be an opportunity to close the residual gap that exists betwen service levels in the Christmas and January period versus those experienced at other times of the year.  As such ECRA continues to view Winning in January as an ongoing opportunity for collaboration to the benefits of suppliers, retailers and shoppers.

Joe Berry Australian Retail Industry Executive Award and ECRA Scholarship

The 2013 Joe Berry Australian Retail Industry Executive Awards were held on Thursday 20 June in Sydney. The event
saw over 200 industry leaders and young executives come together to celebrate retail excellence in Australia. 

Following a full day of judging the Joe Berry Retail Industry Executive Award for 2013 was presented to Graham Fairbarn (Campbell Arnott’s).  Graham presented a positive view of the issues facing local manufacturing and provided some recommendations for improving the options and remaining local.

The winner of the ECRA Award was presented to Claire O’Neill from Simplot Australia. The prize was presented by ECRA Board member James Lane (Coca Cola Amatil). Claire will be attending the prestigious Food and Grocery Executive Program
at Mt Eliza Business School in Melbourne in September. ECRA wish to congratulate Claire on her success.

All information on the Joe Berry Award is available at www.joeberryaward.com.au or through the ASMCA enquiries@asmca.com.

Order to Receipt Excellence - Update

ECRA has established an industry working group focussed on driving improvement in the order to receipt components of the supply chain.  The current group membership includes Nestle, Kimberly-Clark, Sanitarium, Simplot, Cerebos, Coca Cola Amatil, Coles, Woolworths, Metcash and GS1.

The group has now met twice and has bee focussing on three key initiatives approved by the ECRA Board.  Latest progress against these initiatives is:

Multi-Coded Pallets (multiple date/batch codes on a full pallet of a single SKU) 

The group is progressing work aimed at better understanding the costs, financial impacts and benefits to suppliers and retailers of moving to multi-coded pallets through developing sector specific surveys to capture this information. The Surveys will be issued select retailers and suppliers. A summary of findings will be discussed by the group at its next meeting. 

Optimising Advance Shipment Notices 

Metcash advised that they are commencing pilot of e-messaging with select suppliers with a view to rolling out ASNs. Key learnings in regards best practices will beneficial to industry best practice developments. 

ECR UK has recently developed tools aimed at enhancing utilisation of ASNs, the working group are examining the documentation and will determine the merits of application and adoption for the Australian market. 

The group will also investigate issues which undermine utilisation and optimisation of ASNs which are either the result of process failures or where an exception occurs. Following this, the group may develop generic guides/checklists for industry. 

Data Alignment and Integrity 

Noting that the complexity of data integrity and alignment makes development of standards difficult, the group has discussed that it may be more appropriate to focus on education needs of industry and opportunities to provide education tools and guides. This will be investigated further at the next group  meeting on 18 July 2013 in Melbourne.   

Stay tuned for more information of the group’s progress and output in future issues of ECRA Extra.

ECRA Launches New Work Stream - Display Pallets

The ECRA Board has agreed to examine and develop options for standardisation of display pallets for use within the Australian market.  The project, led by A.T. Kearney will ensure both the opportunity for in-store merchandising of product are considered in tandem with solutions that provide efficient and effective supply chain operations.  Further details will be available shortly.