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Leading logistics consultancy, Davies & Robson, has completed a successful logistics tender exercise for leading food manufacturer, Hain Daniels Group, following its acquisition of a number of brands from Premier Foods last year.

HainsHain Daniels Group is a major manufacturer with a £400 million turnover, making and selling food and drinks in chilled, ambient and frozen food categories across three groups: soup and meat-free, chilled drinks, fruit and desserts and jams, spreads and jellies.

The Group was formed when Hain Celestial US acquired Daniels Group in October 2011.

In October 2012, the Hain Daniels Group acquired Premier Foods’ jams, spreads and jellies business and required a new logistics solution to support the storage and distribution of brands including Hartley’s, Sun-Pat, Gale’s, Robertson’s and Frank Cooper’s, produced at Hain Daniels’ manufacturing facility at Histon in Cambridgeshire. The operation involves ambient storage for up to 13,500 pallets, pallet and case picking and the distribution of packed and bulk product to Hain Daniels’ customers throughout the UK.

As an interim solution, Premier Foods initially retained responsibility for this activity following the acquisition, however, in order to minimise unnecessary cost, Hain Daniels required a new solution to be in place as quickly as possible, ideally within six-nine months of the acquisition.

Davies & Robson was appointed to model the operational requirement in order to establish an accurate outsourcing specification, run the tender process to appoint a third-party logistics provider and to prepare and negotiate the contractual agreement, to include a detailed implementation plan.

With extensive experience in managing outsourcing and tender processes, Davies & Robson worked with Hain Daniels and Premier Foods and its contractors to gain a clear understanding of the current logistics operation and establish data sets as the basis for the new solution. In order to specify a future-proof solution, Davies & Robson’s consultants also worked with Hain Daniels to agree growth assumptions and understand planned changes to the distribution profile with regard to SKUs, sales, order size and accounts. The project also involved defining the IT system responsibilities of Hain Daniels and its chosen logistics service provider, along with the interfacing requirements and the analysis of order and manufacturing data to determine the centre of gravity of supply and demand.

In order to meet the tight project timescales and reduce time spent on contractual negotiations, Davies & Robson prepared the contractual agreement early in the process so that this could be shared with shortlisted contractors at final evaluation stage.

As a result, Hain Daniels appointed DHL Supply Chain to manage the operation, which went live recently, from their Huntingdon Distribution Centre.

The Huntington facility is 15 miles from Hain Daniels Histon factory and consists of 250,000 sq ft with a 13 m eave height. DHL will provide storage for a minimum of 4,500 pallets and national distribution using a combination of dedicated and shared user resources.

Alex Tompkins, Hain Daniels Group’s Head of UK Supply Chain said: “While we recognised that it was a ‘big ask’, our key commercial objective was to ensure that we could implement the new solution within a short and limited timeframe. Davies & Robson’s consultants just got their heads down and got on with it and used their experience to identify how we could take time out of the process without detriment to the quality or integrity of the project.

“Both we and our chosen logistics partner have been impressed with just how organised and streamlined the process has been and I am confident that this will translate into a highly efficient logistics operation.”

Davies & Robson

www.daviesrobson.co.uk

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