ARB Electrical: stock to branches within five days on Manhattan SCALE

My name is Vasu Govindasamy. I head up the supply chain unit for ARB, a South African company involved in the distribution of electrical products, and now very much involved in the solar business. We've walked a journey of really modernising the business, and that's where I come in, in the supply chain role.

ARB historically had a very decentralised distribution model, which was largely inefficient. It didn't support any sort of scalability, and the model wasn't sustainable for growing the business. So, as part of a centralised distribution strategy, there had to be a technology partner, and we partnered with Manhattan SCALE and Supply Chain Junction as a big part of the DC operating model. Over and above the inherent inefficiency of what we were doing, there was really no room to grow the business in any shape or form. Those were the key challenges.

There are two parts to this. Obviously there's a very defined ROI, which makes sense, and we have achieved it. But more strategically, we would not have been able to achieve any sort of growth had we not implemented the WMS.

A big defining factor for us was that the software had to be great. It had to functionally tick the boxes. But the most important thing was that we needed faith in the ability of the company to support and implement the software locally. That was perhaps our reason for partnering with Supply Chain Junction and Manhattan.

At the time, ARB was quite immature from a supply chain point of view, and there wasn't a big IT support footprint within the business. Supply Chain Junction came in and filled some of those gaps: very patient, while still being very agile about the things we didn't know we didn't know. The implementation went very well because we had this very agile partner.

I'll tell a story that perhaps answers the question better. We went live on the 16th of December. On Christmas Eve, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, we had Supply Chain Junction support staff on our site helping us get customers' orders out. That tells the story of the commitment and the passion the team has for the business, and most importantly the partnership. They see it as a true partnership: if we didn't get that box out on Christmas Eve, they felt they were failing. That's over and above all the good things they had done in helping us understand our operation a lot better and optimise our processes.

The system enabled centralised distribution. We would never have been able to get that volume of inventory through the DC into the branches as quickly, accurately and cost-effectively without the WMS. We're now able to open branches fairly seamlessly: we bolt them on, and within weeks we're able to support that branch. Opening a new branch is not a big challenge. In terms of growing product ranges, we were able to bring the solar range into the DC and out to the branches very quickly. It's that ability to be agile and grow quickly, and as we look at other product ranges, we're confident we'll be able to bring them into the distribution network.

One of the key measures we've achieved: before the WMS, buyers and planners would create distribution batches to the branches, in other words move stock out of the DC to a branch. That lead time ranged from one week to anything up to a month, and in some cases longer. From a branch point of view there was a lot of frustration and a complete lack of visibility. We're now at a point where that distribution regularly happens within five days. Branches can depend on DC fulfilment, and customers who come to our stores get a very dependable service. We're not dealing in fashion retail: if a customer doesn't have our full basket, he can't do a solar installation at a home or refurbish an electrical installation at an industrial plant. So fulfilment, and the ability to depend on ARB, is where the biggest gains are for our partners and our customers.

We've achieved a lot that we can quantify in productivity gains and in being able to scale into the future. Most importantly, we believe we've got a product that will keep driving productivity improvements, and that will have the functionality we need to support mechanisation and automation in future. We belong to a group of companies, and as we learn and develop at ARB Electrical, we believe we'll roll these learnings and the software out to other businesses in the group.

The one word that springs to mind is transparency, and honesty. We've learned to trust our partner a lot more. We've moved the relationship from them against us around the table to very much a partnership. We trust and believe that we've got a partner exposed to global markets and global operations, over and above the standard things you get. That's where the real value in Supply Chain Junction is.