Chemist Warehouse Improves Visibility, Efficiency & Site Safety with MobileDOCK

Company Background / Introduction

The Chemist Warehouse Group is the largest community pharmacy franchise retailer in Australia with over 500 retail stores and more than 17,000 employees.

The Chemist Warehouse mission is to have the best range of consumer products at the best prices. In order to meet this aggressive mission, strategic objectives around volume efficiencies to enhance customer experience is required.

The Challenge

Chemist Warehouse has a network of six distribution centres (two NDCS, three RDCs and an eCommerce only DC) across Australia, with sites facing issues relating to the arrival of third-party freight including a lack of visibility of inbound freight, difficulty managing labour utilisation and site congestion that impacts driver and employee onsite safety.

Another challenge was the constant communication (via phone and email) between the distribution centres, freight providers and head office related to inbound freight.

Chemist Warehouse were looking for a solution that would ultimately provide them with visibility across all their inbound freight resources at each of their distribution centres, and provide a communication channel between the distribution centres and head office.

Submission by: through to confirmation of delivery completion.

From any internet connected device, Chemist Warehouse can define and control their booking and execution process and monitor compliance, whilst simultaneously reducing congestion, number of required docks and carbon footprint, increasing efficiency all round.

MobileDOCK also acts as a single source of truth between suppliers, carriers, the Chemist Warehouse Distribution centres and Chemist Warehouse Head Office.

“MobileDOCK regulates the flow of transport into our DCs and facilitates better peak and trough period planning. It assists us to measure DC operational and supplier performance. Furthermore, MobileDOCK has reduced unnecessary email communication and helped to centralise all dock scheduling management (ie booking changes and ‘source of truth’ for deliveries)”. Mark Coppola, Supplier Compliance and Governance Manager, Chemist Warehouse Group

The Results

Chemist Warehouse deployed MobileDOCK at the Perth distribution centre in October 2021. Within the first four weeks of deployment, Chemist Warehouse had already realised key improvements across multiple areas. Subsequently, the solution has been deployed at Chemist Warehouse’s other five distribution centres.

“We were looking for a solution that would give Chemist Warehouse control of inbound freight and provide a ‘source of truth’ relating to dock operations in real-time”.

The Solution

Jackie Robb, Chief Operating Officer

CW Retail Group

MobileDOCK is a fully hosted, cloud-based web application. Its intuitive web-based design, and ease of configuration has been built to minimise any setup costs and allow the rapid and global deployment of the solution. MobileDOCK enables dock delivery management from first appointment request for a delivery slot,

Chemist Warehouse now has visibility of the planned inbound volumes at the load and PO level, allowing them to effectively utilise their docks to meet inventory and labour requirements.

As a result of deploying MobileDOCK, Chemist Warehouse’s Dock to Stock cycle time has reduced from over 48 hours to an average of under 24 hours.

MobileDOCK’s automation features have dramatically reduced the manual processing and administration work required for inbound bookings, and team members in different departments now have access to in- bound PO ETAs – removing the need to call and email colleagues.

“MobileDOCK allowed Chemist Warehouse DC’s to understand what was coming, what priority it was and what upstream planning needed to be done in order to inbound our stock efficiently. Using the data gathered from MobileDock, we are able to predict and plan our workforce more appropriately and ultimately get our suppliers’ products to our stores more expediently.”

David

Where to next?

To continue to drive towards excellence, Chemist Warehouse will continue to streamline its processes and in combining the data from its EDI system and MobileDOCK, be in a position to predict deliveries based on supplier lead times and provide alerts and feedback to suppliers when deliveries are expected. This will be of particular interest to suppliers who use third party logistics and transport providers.

MobileDOCK will be part of the upcoming Supplier Portal that Chemist Warehouse is planning to launch in 2023.

Breaking productivity records on VinoMofo’s production line

VinoMofo is Australia’s leading online wine retailer, providing wine to over 500,000 customers globally. VinoMofo’s distribution centre is located in Port Melbourne. With a core permanent team, VinoMofo experiences seasonal spikes in demand for which they need to increase the number of pick packers in their warehouse by 2X.

Business challenges.

Rob Hurn, VinoMofo’s Warehouse Manager, was facing the following challenges using traditional agencies to manage seasonal demands.

• Agency staff were often demotivated unable to quickly pick-up instructions

• Demotivated agency staff led to reduced productivity and output

• High rates of absenteeism, jeopardising the ability to fulfil orders, especially at peaks

• Increase in training time due to frequently getting new workers. With agencies having manual processes to receive requests and requirements from businesses and then notify and confirm the right staff, filling shifts was time consuming and a major hassle.

Sidekicker’s Solution.

Strict screening, ongoing performance data and smart Talent Pools drive superior staff quality. Sidekicker’s screening process includes:

• Right to work and experience checks

• Interview to assess reliability, attitude and communication ability/style

• OH&S induction to meet high standards.

Only 15% of staff pass this process, maintaining quality standards.

Rating, review and reliability data is then captured after every shift and displayed on workers’ profiles, which holds Sidekicks accountable and allows Sidekicker to measure performance and curate the workforce in real-time.

Rob also used smart Talent Pools to easily rehire the best performing workers for ongoing shifts.

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