Selco Builders Warehouse, a leading provider of trade services, offers building products and materials to tradespeople from their 76 outlets across the UK. David Rose, Head of Supply Chain, Tony Davis, Head of Space, and Chris Barber, Store Manager, took some time out from their day in Milton Keynes to share how they have seen significant enhancements in the efficiency of their branches and customer service following their deployment with RELEX Solutions.
Transcript
David Rose: My name is David Rose. I’m Head of Supply Chain for Selco Builders Warehouse. Selco is effectively a builders’ merchant who operates in a retail scheme. We trade from 76 stores nationwide, and we focus on the small jobbing builder and contractor.
We needed to find not only a company that had the software that delivered on our immediate needs, but we also wanted to pick a partner who was continually looking to develop their product and, therefore, hopefully enabling us to benefit from those developments going forward.
We saw RELEX enabling us to do strategic changes to our supply chain in terms of low-cost sourcing, link loads, cross-docking and pick-to-zero operations and the ability to work more collaboratively with our upstream supply chain.
Tony Davis: My name is Tony Davis. I’m Head of Space for Selco Builders Warehouse.
The reason why we chose RELEX is because we wanted to have autonomy over the space and layout area. We wanted to have a function that was very much on its own, and we wanted to embrace that with the supply chain and operations within the organization. And RELEX we found was the best fit because it not only provided us with planogram production but it also provided us with floor planning.
In the short term, we saw the opportunity to improve our on-shelf availability as well as reducing our working capital. But perhaps overall, the biggest benefit was the ability for us to be able to change that balance between availability and stock much more effectively than trying to communicate with 76 individual people to ask them all to implement a strategy simultaneously at the same time.
Chris Barber: Hi, I’m Chris Barber, Store Manager here at Selco Milton Keynes. We’ve been here in Milton Keynes for six years and have been on a number of trials and pilots, and the latest one has been with RELEX. And we’ve been piloting the RELEX replenishment model.
The benefits I’ve seen from RELEX have been our stock availability is a lot higher, our top stocks are a lot less, and the labor involved in doing the ordering is a lot less for my colleague in the office. She only has to spend about an hour a day doing the ordering, and then she can spend the rest on the shop floor helping customers.
TD: For the very first time, we’re able to see a plan in pounds-per-square-foot and that we can measure so much analytical information that we could never dream of seeing from an old system.
DR: Without a doubt, one of the best experiences we had with RELEX was the way they collaborated with us. We worked again as a small group. We felt that RELEX were our friends and we had a relationship where we could be open and honest, and that we could discuss options freely.
We felt that RELEX listened to our needs, yeah, and offered us several alternatives. It wasn’t a situation where RELEX said, hey, this is the option. This is the only option. But they came along with a range of different offerings which we could openly discuss the merits for.
I think there’s a real belief within Selco that RELEX aren’t just interested in selling us a piece of software but are actually interested in helping us to achieve the maximum potential from that.
