Supply Chain by the Numbers
   
 

- May 3, 2013
   
  Supply Chain by the Numbers for Week of May 3, 2013 - WERC and ISM Edition
   
 

7-11 Finds Delivery Consolidation is a Store Convenience; Not Many Companies Can Sense and Respond; Plant Flowers, Not Grass, at the DC; GE Spends Some Money on Spend Analytics
   
 
 
 

17

Approximate number of weekly deliveries that convenience store chain 7-11 is now seeing at some of its West Coast outlets, down from more than 50 in the past. That change came as the result of consolidating previously separate DSD, fresh food and "middle of the store" deliveries that all used to run on their own schedules. Now, at some stores, all three types of product are delivered to stores together, according to VP of logistics and demand chain Cristi Clinger during a panel discussion at the WERC conference in Dallas this week. Here's the funny part: to get around various local bottling requirements, in those areas 7-11 buys Coke and Pepsi products from COSTCO, which it then delivers to its c-stores.
 
 



 
 
 

9%

Percent of an audience of about 2000 people at the ISM conference in Dallas this week who voted that their organizations had both "smart sensing and quick response" supply chain capabilities. That compares with 47% who said they had "good sense, but slow response," 24% who said they had "lagging sense but good response," and 20% who said they weren't sure. That during a live poll conducted by keynote speaker Dr. Hau Lee of Stanford on building "sense and respond" supply chains.
 
 
 
 
 
7.3

The multiple it costs a distribution center to maintain "mowed grass" around a distribution center versus converting those areas into "prairie" conditions with native plants and wildflowers, according to Richard Murphy of Murphy Warehouse Co. this week at the WERC conference in Dallas. Who knew? Murphy said at a facility with six acres of land that has gone prairie, annual maintenance costs are just $4200, versus almost $22,000 at another Murphy facility with just four acres of lawn. If both facilities were grass, annual costs would be $52,000, versus just $7000 or so if both were prairie.
 
 
 
 
 

300+

Number of entries GE often had for a single supplier in its purchasing database, making it extremely difficult if not impossible to calculate how much it was spending with a given vendor. A few years later, and GE now has a robust "spend analytics" application (built in-house) that with combined with an effort to recode all those entries has taken care of that problem, and can connect all the "parent-child" relationships among its vendors. The payback in terms of insight, speed and spend leverage has been exception, a company executive said at the ISM conference this week.
 
 
 
 
 
 
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