Sainsbury's Supply Chain

901 Words4 Pages
In today’s economic environment, achieving and sustaining operational excellence is a key concern. Some of the factors that put heavy strain on operational excellence of a company are cost pressures, changing customer expectations, fluctuating markets and strong competitors. For any supermarket, operational excellence is a necessity to become successful. To boost the operational processes of a company, technological developments play a vital role. Some of the technologies such as Lean Six Sigma, High Velocity Performance System etc help in boosting the operational performance of a company (Potter, 2004). At Sainsbury’s, the operations have been so varied that each department has its own operational structure. It has independence in all areas…show more content…
These contracts basically involve all the orders done online plus returns of all non-food items. This has been very successful especially during the festive periods with one successful aspect of the contract being the online services offered. Sainsbury’s success in effective logistics management throughout the supply chain has been accomplished through the proper linking of its warehouse to flight terminals. The logistics of Sainsbury's has been made better by the setting up of convenient depots. Warehousing is another critical part of Sainsbury's supply chain. In order for it to operate with efficiency and stamp authority in the supply chain, Sainsbury's has created adequately large warehouses and depots for the storage of its products. Sainsbury’s uses a complex system of Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP systems which integrate business oriented data and business processes throughout an organization (Clegg et.al 2011). These software based systems are essential in employing a push, dependant demand system. This ensures that there is appropriate supply stability and a bottle neck situation is avoided. The need for collection of precise data makes it a challenge for IT administrators and recent news have been evidence of mishaps caused due to errors used in…show more content…
The cash flow problem at the Sainsbury’s supply chain has to be addressed to create space for making payments. As a policy in the company's supply chain management, new technology has been well utilized to ensure that the best of it is utilized. This is evident in the aggressive use of the best point of sale systems, e-commerce and logistics operations. A wide range of pioneering systems is implemented in various functions of the organization such as trade, human resource, finance as well as procurement among others. This has been supported by the application of the latest by Sainsbury’s IT department. The backbone of Sainsbury’s activities in Sainsbury’s supply chain management systems has been its capability to competently hold information on its arrival and to effectively integrate it into the ERP systems. The expertise of the supply chain executive to coordinate all the processes in the supply chain in order to share business related information has been one of the company’s best
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