The Hovis Division of Premier Foods, the UK's largest food producer, is targeting improved customer service and reduced waste following a transformation of its supply chain carried out in collaboration with Capgemini UK plc. The new solution, which is currently being rolled out across all 23 Hovis bakery sites, will provide traceability for every batch of bread baked across the entire end-to-end manufacturing and distribution supply chain .

According to Trading Markets, Premier Foods says that key benefits of the new solution, which will be fully implemented by the end of 2010, include better customer service, with improved accuracy of order fulfillment, and an improved visibility of supply chain performance.

The nationwide rollout of the new solution has now started following a successful pilot program involving three Hovis sites.

The project to develop and prove the new supply chain solution was led by a team of Capgemini SAP and supply chain specialists working closely with Premier Foods' staff, with SAP, who provide the core technology underpinning the solution, and with barcode scanning specialists Zetes.

Phil McCallum, Director of IT and Infrastructure at Premier Foods, said:

Dave Novak, senior vice president of sales and business development for SPS Commerce, can tell you about the importance of listening to your customers.

According to Tech Target, SPS offers a Web-based set of intelligence services that helps retailers and suppliers run their supply chains more efficiently. With 1,200 retailers and some 37,000 customers tied together in its ecosystem, SPS had an "immense amount of data" flowing through its data centers, including such things as invoices, purchase orders and packing and labeling information, according to Novak.

"We knew our data centers were loaded with all this rich and valuable content. But we also knew that customers wanted to know more about the data we were processing for them," Novak said.

"For instance, a customer selling to Target might want to know how their fulfillment rates are doing or which products are moving faster to consumers and which ones are in danger of being overstocked."

Listening to what his customers really wanted and knowing that he already had those underutilized goods in hand, Novak realized he was sitting on a new business opportunity. But to take advantage of it, he needed one more element.

"All we needed was a reliable business intelligence platform that could deliver this data to our customers as well as augment our own operational applications," he said.

Novak and his team began their quest to find that supply chain business intelligence platform -- one that would be Web-based so as to fit with their SaaS business model. One thing they quickly discovered was the paucity of Web-based offerings to choose from.

"First and foremost, we needed something that was 100% Internet-based," Novak said. "I didn't want to deal with any client-server stuff, integrating all these different UIs, security and metadata layers. When you really research it, there are not many out there."

Ultimately, SPS chose Oracle's Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) platform. An important reason for choosing the product was its multi-tenant capabilities, which the company believed could adequately handle the large number of customers it had on the supply side.

Workers in Walmart's supply chain producing goods including shoes, Christmas lights, tools, curtains and paper boxes for sale in the US are laboring in "illegal and degrading conditions", a new report claims.

According to Procurement Leaders, China Labor Watch's latest investigation of five Wal-Mart supplier factories claims that "not a single factory has implemented Wal-Mart's basic standards, and a total of 10,000 workers included in the report suffer serious rights abuses".

In the report, CLW attributes this failure to ineffective auditing and a pricing structure that forces factories to sell goods at unsustainable prices. As the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart leverages its massive product orders to purchase goods at low prices, and workers suffer the financial burden, according to CLW.

"This is not about a single factory, but about Wal-Mart's inability to implement its standards," said CLW Executive Director, Li Qiang.

The report states that workers at all five factories work at least 3 hours of overtime/day, for 100-140 total hours of overtime/month, and one factory routinely schedules overtime through the night. Two of the factories illegally underpay overtime wages at rates as low as $0.44/hour, and two withhold wages from workers who fail to meet production quotas.

"Worker abuse extends beyond paychecks. Workers at two factories are denied gloves on the grounds that it will slow production. Dormitory conditions are so poor that at one factory, there is no running water in the bathrooms," CLW stated.

According to CLW Wal-Mart has already pledged to "remediate" these five factories.

HP Australia says it has reduced the carbon footprint of its Imaging & Printing Group (IPG) after revising its supply chain model.

According to Carbon Offset Daily, the company claims to have reduced carbon emissions on products sourced by sea freight by 41%, after shifting its product port-of-entry from Fremantle to Melbourne and Sydney in order to be closer to most of its customers on the eastern seaboard, thus cutting down rail and road freight usage.

Previously, all IPG hardware was being delivered nationally from HP’s Central Distribution Office in Sydney, with 40% of all supplies landing in Fremantle and then being delivered via rail to customers across Australia. 40% of hardware from the CDO was also being delivered to Melbourne by truck. Previous truck deliveries from the CDO were not optimised to use larger trucks and HP was estimated to have emitted 6,400 tonnes of CO2 in 2008.

“We conducted a study with our worldwide office at the end of our third quarter in July and found that there has been a dramatic decrease in our environmental footprint since we have implemented the new supply chain model,” said IPG South Pacific vice president Richard Bailey.

“The new supply chain model has saved over 2,600 tonnes of CO2 emitted by HP Australia over the last year, which equates to 21.6 acres of forest preserved from deforestation or 66,666 trees grown for 10 years from seedlings.”

The company has also adopted a policy of using trucks with a higher storage capacity, therefore reducing emissions from road freight to 3,776 tonnes per annum.

HP now says it is aiming to reduce sea freight emissions by a further 20% by 2013.

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