Community Foods hits stock accuracy with integrated system

According to John Davies, director of operations for the dried food supplier, its new Accellos WMS has also reduced wastage and improved stock reconciliation, which he puts down to seamless integration with the firm's ERP software. "We have seen significant gains since installing Accellos and we expect a lot more to come," confirms Davies. "We did have a management system [before], but it wasn't warehouse specific," he continues. "It had a manual paper-based workflow, which was batch updated during the course of the day. From our order-processing perspective, we were plagued with the uncertainty of quantity and freshness of stock in the warehouse when we came to pick orders." Davies says that led to a high degree of stock loss and shrinkage as a result of not being able to control inventory movements accurately. "Secondly, we were experiencing a high level of picking errors. Warehouse operatives picked the wrong product because it was in the wrong location or poorly recorded. As a result of these, we had a high level of invoice errors, which consequentially resulted in a lot of customer claims and credits," he adds. "To provide the necessary due diligence we need systems that will help control our processes," states Davies. "The real time functionality of Accellos gives us much better information from the point of view of processing orders in real time to visibility of stock movements in real time," he says.