A large proportion of sales are made via van sales operations which, due to the short-life mature of many of the products, necessitates that customers get daily deliveries.

To expedite the van sales the company uses three fleets of vehicles (dairy, meat and water), with each van carrying stock of up to 300 SKU’s.

Initially, LPC International was retained by Newey and Eyre to review its supply chain activities to their circa 200 wholesale branches. Each branch operated effectively as a “stand-alone” business, being responsible for its own buying, stockholding, sales and local delivery operations. The UK was split into regions with each region providing, via a regional hub or “superbranch” some level of stock-cover over and above that carried by each branch. In turn the network was supported by a 90,000 sq.ft NDC at Warrington. 

LPC was retained by Denny to:

• To identify a range of options for distributing finished products in Northern Ireland.
• To identify the costs and key attributes of each option.

To evaluate each option in terms of:

1. Cost minimisation
2. Product date maximisation
3. Business simplification
4. The ability to meet future business needs
5. Flexibility and reliability