The Musgrave Group simplifies supply chain

The Musgrave Group has extended its investment in Infor Supply Chain Execution (SCE) as part of the company’s a 40,000-man day, £16 million project, known as ‘Musgrave Simplifies Retail’ (MSR). 

The recently completely MSR project is designed to align costs and operations across the group’s Londis and Budgens brands throughout the UK and Ireland, providing more consistent visibility of costs and business done with specific suppliers to help improve profitability. 

MSR implemented a common enterprise resource planning (ERP) framework across operations in the UK and Ireland to deliver a single commercial platform across the group, allowing for single cost and better buying benefits.

As part of the MSR project, Infor SCE will help enable the delivery of products to any Musgrave Group warehouse site, providing operational flexibility and a more consistent set of transport costs for reporting purposes.

The upgraded Infor SCE will enable the future goal of “Any Product to Any Site” (APAS), to allow routing product in any warehouse to any retail site. This will help Musgrave Group eliminate brand-exclusive warehouses and deliver more standardised cost data. The Group also anticipates being able to improve negotiations with suppliers with this increased visibility.

Infor SCE will also facilitate cross-docking operations at Musgrave warehouses to help improve the speed and efficiency of order fulfilment.

“As part of the MSR project we realised we needed to have far greater consistency of costs and operations across the Budgens and Londis brands,” said Mark Trevarrow, MSR project director for The Musgrave Group. “Previously we had ‘brand-aligned’ warehouses, meaning products could only be shipped to certain stores from a specific warehouse. This actually resulted in different costs for the same product going to different shops.”

“Delivered on time and under budget, MSR will help enable far greater consistency and deliver the benefits of standardisation across our operations in Ireland and mainland UK. A key part of this is the fact that, enabled by Infor SCE, we will be able to supply any product to sites that were previously brand-exclusive and track the costs consistently.”

The company recently revealed it was also implementing new space planning and planogram automation software to deliver competitive advantage to its retail partners

The nine retail brands within the Musgrave Group’s international portfolio, delivered combined sales of €6.6 billion (£5.6bn) in 2011. In the UK and Ireland, brands include Budgens, Londis, Daybreak and MACE.