Order to Receipt Excellence - Program Update

ECRA’s industry working group comprising Nestle, Kimberly-Clark, Sanitarium, Simplot, Cerebos, Lion, Coca-Cola Amatil, Coles, Woolworths, Metcash and GS1 have been working to drive improvement in the order to receipt components of the supply chain throughout 2013.

The group has been 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) 

Work is progressing with retailers to establish and commit to a draft standard framework of rules around MCP which will has been put to suppliers and GS1 for review and revision prior to a final framework being delivered at the ECRA convention on 17 October. 

The actual conversion to MCP at a company level is a matter for decision between trading partners based on the business impacts to those specific partners. The role of the group is to ensure that any supplier moving to MCP would face the same (standardised) requirements with all 3 major retailers and that these requirements would be supported and stable. 

Optimising Advance Shipment Notices (ASN’s) 

The group has identified the most prevalent and impactful process issues and exceptions currently precluding optimisation of ASNs and their underlying causes. The key issues will be discussed at the next group meeting with a view to then moving to address priority issues at industry level.

Data Alignment and Integrity

Similarly to ASN Optimisation, the group has identified the priority issues of data misalignment and inaccuracy that would benefit from the development of educational guides for industry to address and the primary underlying causes of these issues. The key issues will be discussed at the next group meeting with a view to then moving to address the priority issues at industry level.

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