Abbott Laboratories -  manufacture chemicals and pharmaceutical products for both the UK market and export to the other Abbott operations worldwide

the brief - we had previously carried out a UK Warehousing & Distribution Strategy Review for the client. The review considered their existing sales and throughput qualified by Abbott's 5 year predictions with a broad 5-10 year outlook.

Growth in many business sectors had been even greater than anticipated and there had also been some changes to the structure of the business in the interim. Therefore the client required us to revisit and extend the scope of the previous study in the form of a new Logistics Strategy Review.

the approach - as Supply Chain Planning Limited had a reasonable knowledge and understanding of the organisation and personalities involved, the familiarisation process was quickly completed. Initially we collected data on the increased growth in throughput and sales that was not anticipated when our original analysis was carried out. During the time between the initial project and this new study the growth to manufacturing had resulted in the need for expanding production into the warehousing area, meaning pallet capacity had been considerably reduced. We looked at a number of options to increase storage capacity, but first it was most important to dispose of all redundant unwanted stock. Then we prepared a number of other options to increase capacity:-

The strategy project also reviewed the product distribution by looking at the patterns of deliveries and the cost per package for each of the carriers. After analysing this we made recommendation on the suitability and cost-efficiency of each of the client's current chosen distribution suppliers.

the results - the client has successfully implemented our recommended set of initiatives to meet their future requirements for both storage and distribution.

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