Cotton On Group South African DC with Manhattan WMS | SCJ

My name is Phil Marais. I'm head of DCs for Africa and Brazil for the Cotton On Group. Cotton On Group is an apparel and lifestyle brand, and we run operations all around the world. I've been with Cotton On for eight years, so it's been a long journey that has taken us through many different challenges and solutions.

We were a paper-based organisation before WMS. I wasn't at Cotton On at that time, but taking a DC from a paper-based environment into WMS is always exciting and always challenging, because you've got people who've done things a certain way. Having that increased control, and teams you can track and help to be more efficient, is always going to benefit everybody. It's just the change management to get them there.

We recently built a new facility and used the Supply Chain Junction and Manhattan teams to design, scope, spec and build the parameters we implemented. It's been a really good journey.

Maybe I can speak about our most recent work with SCJ and Manhattan, where we designed a facility and then moved into it. I remember us sitting on one of those big rolls of cable, discussing how we were going to figure out slotting in our facility: kicking the tyres on what we were looking for, what we didn't want to use and what the functionality was, and coming to a really good solve for our business based on what the WMS was able to offer us.

We've built, I think, five DCs, or it will be five after June. South Africa was the first warehouse to be scoped, specced and implemented. A lot of the work the Supply Chain Junction team did here we were then able to replicate in the other WMS implementations. Learning from the benefits, and from the things we didn't do well, and using those to the next implementation's advantage was critical to the success of the other moves.

I found our discussions very collaborative. It wasn't "this is what we must do". It was "let me understand your business, here are a couple of options, which one do you think?", steering the conversation to a solve that got the most out of the WMS we were implementing as well as meeting the customer's needs. It's always been about the SCJ guys really helping us with best practice: us explaining our business model and how we do things today, and seeing whether there were opportunities to move towards best practice, or whether our business needed to stay as it was and how they'd facilitate that in our environment.

One big metric for us at Cotton On is safety. We've just gone through 365 days LTI-free, lost-time-injury free, which is a huge metric for us. It means every single person who came to our site as a full-time employee went home safely every day for the last year. And if that's not cool enough, we were able to deliver productivity increases of between 10 and 15% at our site just from engineering changes throughout the facility: making sure pick paths were efficient, understanding how best to get what our business needed, and equipping our people to deal with that demand effectively.

Manhattan Active is an exciting future step for us. Not having to upgrade is always exciting in the DC world, because an upgrade means interruption and increased risk to my business. And the changes and functionality that Active offers compared with the version we're on now are really exciting.

The service level from Manhattan is wonderful. When you need a depth of technical skill that you can't provide in your own environment, having someone on the phone, wherever that person is, who can provide that skill is really valuable. The learning my team has done through this in-depth work has deepened their knowledge, so they can often provide the first line of help themselves, and there's always someone on the end of the phone or the computer for anything further. That balance between what we can do ourselves and "that's a bit too deep for me, let's get the right person on the line" has worked really well. Building my team's knowledge has been important too, because you don't want to be calling someone in a call centre, or across the pond, for something relatively simple. It gives the team more confidence in their own knowledge, and lets them go deeper with the technical specialists.

My advice: we all have blind spots. You don't know what you don't know, so don't be scared to ask the question. Get people around you who know those areas of work well. Be like a sponge and pick up everything you can, and when you need to put your head on the block and stand behind an opinion, make sure you've done the due diligence, asked the person who knows best, and formed your own view from that.