Advanced Supply Chain
A fantastically innovative logistics company, who in my time with them supported some of the best garment importers, manufacturers and retailers in the UK, through a great freight forwarding division based in Hong Kong and Dubai, and into a very well developed UK warehouse and transport network.
The Challenge
I joined Advanced ("ASCG") in early 2017. The owners of ASCG had worked with my previous employer, the
Clipper Group, many years earlier and wanted me to help them achieve some of the really successful growth that I had helped Clipper to benefit from. ASCG had a strong base, but had not managed any real growth across the previous 4 years (see chart, below, to the end of their FY16)
What I Did
I immediately put Sage 200 into the business, upgrading from an old legacy system. Through introducing purchase order management, we were able to keep track of all spend. Simple enough! Then, through setting up Sage for individual business units, started to track all revenues and costs to provide extremely accurate management accounts. For the first time, ASCG enjoyed full visibility of sales, profits and cash per operation. Then, using scorecards, KPIs, strong management information, and carefully worded narratives, started to build really strong confidence in the numbers. The team could see, for every material decision they made, what was the resulting P&L and cash effect. The key for a logistics business, a bit like manufacturing businesses, is to make the maximum use of every resource in the business - vehicles, warehouse square footage, fork lift trucks, staff... and when you've maximised all of those, go back and increase the resources that keep holding back further growth and development. This enabled ASCG to not only trade more efficiently, but also to quote very effectively which was their game changer. So, in one word, I gave them confidence to move the business forwards. Sounds simple, but really worked!
What I Achieved
Into FY19 (see graphic below), ASCG recorded very strong annual growth which was the result of extra sales through optimising site capacities (maximising sales per sq ft), opening new sites and adding more transportation. Clipper went on to further growth from 2020 onwards, following on from the foundations I had put in place, and eventually pushed through a great sale to the Reconomy Group
