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.