Wegmans to Report on Collaborative Ordering 2008-05-12

MARK HAMSTRA

LAS VEGAS — Wegmans Food Markets is implementing a “collaborative ordering project” in partnership with Coca-Cola that gives the beverage giant better visibility into Wegmans' sales data to improve direct-store-delivery operations, according to a presentation at the Food Marketing Institute Show here last week.

Marianne Timmons, vice president of supply chain and global business-to-business, Wegmans, said the implementation of the project will wrap up at the end of this month, after which the chain will share the results with the industry.

The new system is part of a broader industry initiative involving several retailers and suppliers called “New Ways of Working Together” that seeks to create standards for vendor-retailer collaboration.

Timmons and other presenters on two separate FMI panels outlined a framework for implementing the “New Ways” platform, which evolved from a previous project called the “Next Generation Sales Call” and is centered on leveraging standards both for product data and for the various measurements used to gauge the efficiency of the supplier-to-consumer process. The system involves using scorecards with measures that both sides agree upon.

(SN recently described the New Ways initiative in a Page 1 story in the April 7 issue.)

On a separate panel, Jeff Bornino, director of corporate supply chain, Kroger Co., said working in collaborative teams with some key suppliers on joint business planning is helping the retailer to better focus on satisfying the consumer and is creating a more synchronized supplier-retailer team.

He said the teams, which include as many as 20 or more people from various disciplines from both the supplier and the retailer, have focused on isolating two or three priority strategies at a time to make the sell-through process more seamless from supplier to consumer.

“This really brings clarity to how you measure results,” he added, “rather than going back and saying, ‘Well, this worked for them, but it really didn't work for us.’”