Food supply
Harlow & Stott
Cutting nine days from every order
A wholesale bakery supplier was taking nine days to turn an order into a delivery. We mapped every hand-off, removed four of them, and moved the cut-off time by one afternoon.
The result
9 → 3
days from order to delivery
£1.4m
cash no longer tied up in stock
−22%
waste in the first quarter
The brief
Harlow & Stott supplies flour, fats and ingredients to 300 bakeries across the south-west. Orders were growing, but every order took nine days to reach a customer, and the sales team had started to promise less than the warehouse could keep.
Ruth Stott asked us to find out where the time went, and to say plainly whether it was worth fixing.
What we found
In two weeks we followed 40 real orders from phone call to van. Only 26 hours of the nine days was work. The rest was waiting: for a credit check that ran once a day, for a pick list that was printed in a batch, and for a driver who could only load after lunch.
We set the finding out on one page and walked the team through it. Nobody argued with the page.
What changed
Four hand-offs went. The credit check now runs on entry, pick lists print as orders arrive, and loading starts in the morning. None of it needed new software, and the whole change went live in one week over a bank holiday.
Where it stands
Orders now reach customers in three days on average. Stock on the shelf fell by a fifth, which released the cash, and the bakery customers noticed before the sales team told them.
“
We had been told for years that the delay was the ovens. It was a fax-era approval step nobody owned.
Ruth Stott, Managing Director
