Reduction in delivery times creates increasing pressure in the Food industry

It’s hard to ignore, customers increasingly want to buy whatever they want and have it as soon as they possibly can. Customers hold all the cards and your competition are equally feeling the pressure to deliver quicker than ever before. 

The Grocer revealed that Waitrose now have a Rapid Delivery service where customers will receive orders within TWO HOURS in parts of London. In a matter of weeks, they were forced to expand the service following encouraging growth in demand which saw their average number of orders rise by 20%. The two-hour delivery is made possible by their partnership with On the Dot, which despatches orders by bicycle or van.

Elsewhere, Ocado announced their plans to tackle the rapid grocery delivery market with the launch of a ONE HOUR service for orders under £60 from next month. Again, testing out of a London site, they will be using a third-party courier to make this all possible.

How can you make your delivery slicker than ever before?

With the retailers implementing these measures for their customers, can you imagine what is going to happen if one of their suppliers starts delivering the goods through their door in a matter of hours? Inevitably, this will ramp up the expectation across the board and your process for receiving orders from the retailers will need streamlining.

You simply can’t afford to receive an order over the phone whilst staring down the barrel of not knowing what you have in stock. You need faith that your stock movements can be controlled and directed by your business system so you can complete the final pick, pack and ship with the utmost confidence in dealing with your customer.

If you’re still dealing in paper, then how can you have any belief that your batch/use by or sell by dates are completely accurate? Dynamics Food will eliminate the confusion and wasted time associated with time-consuming changes to reflect new information, as you can change everything as necessary and inform the rest of your business at the click of a button.

With integrated EDI, Dynamics Food will enable you to seamlessly pass automated information between your systems and those of your Third-party logistics (3PL) company. Another classic 3PL story is shipping for example, 500 items and invoicing for all 500 items, only to see a Proof of Delivery (POD) note with 490 received. Having the POD information back in real-time gives you the ability to discuss those differences with your customer much quicker and report on historical variance patterns. 

Interested in learning more about Dynamics Food?

Some of the companies already using Dynamics Food include well-known names as Bounce Foods, Copernus, County Confectionery, David Berryman, Faccenda Foods, Forza Foods, Gressingham Foods, Kent Foods, Laila's Fine Foods, Nantwich Cheese Company, Neal's Yard Dairy, Pipers Crisps, Rondanini and Zeina Foods.

Dynamics Food is our offer of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (formerly Dynamics NAV) to provide a complete end-to-end ERP software for food companies. To learn more about how Dynamics Food, you can register for our upcoming webinar on Wednesday 6th March: Does your business system make Christmas in the Food industry a nightmare?.