Chemist Warehouse improves visibility, efficiency and site safety with Mobiledock
The Chemist Warehouse Group is the largest community pharmacy franchise retailer in Australia with over 500 retail stores and more than 17,000 employees.
The Chemist Warehouse mission is to have the best range of consumer products at the best prices. In order to meet this aggressive mission, strategic objectives around volume efficiencies to enhance customer experience is required.
The Challenge
Chemist Warehouse has a network of six distribution centres (two NDCS, three RDCs and an eCommerce only DC) across Australia, with sites facing issues relating to the arrival of third-party freight including a lack of visibility of inbound freight, difficulty managing labour utilisation and site congestion that impacts driver and employee on-site safety.
Another challenge was the constant communication (via phone and email) between the distribution centres, freight providers and head office related to inbound freight.
Chemist Warehouse were looking for a solution that would ultimately provide them with visibility across all their inbound freight resources at each of their distribution centres, and provide a communication channel between the distribution centres and head office.
The Solution
Mobiledock is a fully hosted, cloud-based web application. Its intuitive web-based design, and ease of configuration has been built to minimise any setup costs and allow the rapid and global deployment of the solution. Mobiledock enables dock delivery management from first appointment request for a delivery slot, through to confirmation of delivery completion.
From any internet connected device, Chemist Warehouse can define and control their booking and execution process and monitor compliance, whilst simultaneously reducing congestion, number of required docks and carbon footprint, increasing efficiency all round.
Mobiledock also acts as a single source of truth between suppliers, carriers, the Chemist Warehouse Distribution centres and Chemist Warehouse Head Office.
The Results
Chemist Warehouse deployed Mobiledock at the Perth distribution centre in October 2021. Within the first four weeks of deployment, Chemist Warehouse had already realised key improvements across multiple areas. Subsequently, the solution has been deployed at Chemist Warehouse’s other five distribution centres.
Chemist Warehouse now has visibility of the planned inbound volumes at the load and PO level, allowing them to effectively utilise their docks to meet inventory and labour requirements.
As a result of deploying Mobiledock, Chemist Warehouse’s Dock to Stock cycle time has reduced from over 48 hours to an average of under 24 hours.
Mobiledock’s automation features have dramatically reduced the manual processing and administration work required for inbound bookings, and team members in different departments now have access to inbound PO ETAs – removing the need to call and email colleagues.
Where to next?
To continue to drive towards excellence, Chemist Warehouse will continue to streamline its processes and in combining the data from its EDI system and Mobiledock, be in a position to predict deliveries based on supplier lead times and provide alerts and feedback to suppliers when deliveries are expected. This will be of particular interest to suppliers who use third party logistics and transport providers.
Mobiledock will be part of the upcoming Supplier Portal that Chemist Warehouse is planning to launch in 2023.