Tea firm brews supply chain improvements

Hall: Reducing costs by optimising stock levels

Tea and coffee manufacturer Taylors of Harrogate is implementing a series of enhancements to its supply chain systems to improve production and project management workloads.

Trials for an advanced scheduling system across Taylors' Yorkshire Tea, coffee and speciality tea divisions will start in January, and the software is expected to be fully implemented by June.

The system is expected to improve the company's management of product shelf life, maturation times, storage restrictions and overlapping processes, according to group IT manager Simon Hall.

"We expect to reduce working capital by optimising stock levels, and save production time by planning more efficiently and having fewer changeovers," he said.

The Infor-supplied system will sit on an existing enterprise resource planning platform provided by the same supplier and will work alongside a forecasting tool.

Taylors is also planning to introduce a product lifecycle management system to increase knowledge sharing and visibility in its project management processes.

"We want to get ourselves better organised for new product development. We can do that now, but introducing the new software means we will be able to get products out to market a lot more smoothly and efficiently," said Hall.

"If, for example, someone comes up with a new idea for a tea bag, everyone involved with that project, be it design, sales or logistics, will be able to dip in and out of this central depository of data, look at the different stages of the project and know what they should and should not be doing at that particular stage."

Currently, the business is reliant on minutes from meetings to identify the actions that are needed. Centralising project data should make the business more agile.

"Even if a product does not happen to be made, we will understand the reasons why it did not happen and maybe in five years' time we can come back to that data and reduce our dependence on the individual knowledge within the team," said Hall.

Taylors plans to implement the product lifecycle management software by the end of 2009, after the advanced scheduler rollout is complete.