Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - October 2008 - (Page 58)

CASE STUDY Church’s Serves Up Big Savings with E-Procurement Among other benefits, an on-demand purchasing solution frees up Church's Chicken store managers from the time-consuming and wasteful expense of invoice management. B y definition, a fast-food restaurant experience means a quick one-two-three: you order, it’s fulfilled, and you’re on your way. So, something is not quite right if you have to stand around because there aren’t enough people to serve you. Usually, when lines start building, the store manager pitches in or at least is on hand to bring a little efficiency to things. However, that may not happen if he or she is in the back doing paperwork. Recognizing that burying restaurant managers with admin work defeated their core responsibility to ensure high-quality customer service, Church’s Chicken implemented an on-demand procurement system with a number of benefits beyond just automating purchasing. One of those is freeing up managers from manually keying in data from invoices after each delivery is made of chicken or other supplies. Church’s, based in Atlanta, has more than 1,600 locations in 20 countries and sales exceeding $1bn. It operates 260 restaurants and 12 distribution centers in the U.S. That makes for quite a few invoices, and when the company studied the issue, it realized that invoice management was an application that could quickly deliver efficiencies. Managers at each of its U.S. stores were spending about one and a half hours processing invoices for each of the twice-weekly distribution deliveries. Working with ArrowStream, a supply chain management solutions provider that has largely focused on the food industry since its inception in 2000, Church’s saw a way to remedy its inefficient handling of invoice data. The hosted purchasing solution is called ArrowStream OnDemand. A separate solution, ArrowStream Logistics, manages Church’s transportation and inventory needs. “With the new automated system, it now takes the average manager just five minutes an invoice, offering time savings of about 500 man-hours per week,” says David Taylor, director of restaurant systems for Church’s Chicken. “This allows restaurant managers to spend more time on customer service, which ultimately improves customer satisfaction and store profitability.” Rodger Mullen, president of Chicagobased ArrowStream, says the manual process that Church’s employed effectively barred the retailer from managing its supply chain from manufacturing to distributors and then to its retail stores. The labor-intensive nature of things was evident from the Excel spreadsheets and time involved in individual data entry. “Perhaps most importantly, it was a very reactionary type of environment, versus the ability to drive your supply chain through the use of a lot of information,” Mullen says. “That meant reacting to business problems rather than 58 OCTOBER 2008

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Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - October 2008

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