CSfD has been chosen to take part in a major project to open a Brakes depot in the Irish Republic. Following a ten year close business partnership between Brakes and

Northern Ireland based O'Kane Foodservice, an existing customer of CSfD, Brakes acquired a majority stake in a joint venture with them in October 2008. The new collaboration involved cross border trading and multi currency requirements and CSfD's KDS system was deemed a good fit to meet the ongoing requirements of the restructured business.

Brakes chose KDS for the new implementation because it required few changes to be made to meet requirements, thereby not only minimising cost, but also reducing risk and speeding up implementation timescales. In addition, there was also a desire to install new hardware and move the operating system from Unix to Red Hat Linux. The operational side of the project sought to open a new Brakes depot in Dublin to service customers in the Republic. This created a new requirement for the existing system to cope with multiple currencies. In addition, the opportunity was also taken to address a number of operational requirements, including day one for day two or day three deliveries and changes to EDI invoicing. CSfD project management took responsibility for liaising with the various project owners within both Brakes and O'Kane for the separate parts of the project and ultimately for co-ordinating the successful conclusion of the differing elements..

CSfD's long association with O'Kane meant that we had in depth knowledge of the existing infrastructure and we had fairly recently embarked on a project with them to ensure that the reliability and performance of the existing equipment was being maximised.

Operational requirements included:

• Order processing changes: day one for day two and day one for day three delivery

• Telesales session end: to enable separate telesales session end processes to be executed and to enable separate supplier cut off dates for each order cycle

• Picking documentation: to enable the selection of a range of national accounts and order cycles when producing picking documentation

• Route balancing: a report to show the routes assigned to each order for a selected delivery day and to highlight any orders for which the route has been amended.

The new depot in Dublin has employed an inventive design in order to optimise the management of daily deliveries of just in time goods. Roll cages are assigned individually to customers and arranged in drop sequence within a route. Order capture takes place at the Lisburn depot in Northern Ireland, where the goods are then picked in bulk before being shipped to Dublin overnight. On the basis of order information fed to Dublin from Lisburn over the IT network, the system performs a route balancing exercise and then dynamically allocates a cage to a route. The cages are organised in drop and route sequence within the warehouse correspondingly. Third party software takes data from the KDS system in order to produce cage labels. Effectively, this allows the goods to be moved to the cage, rather then the more traditional method of moving the cages to static product locations, improving the efficiency of the process.

The system also caters for the management of ambient goods that are shipped on day 1 but for delivery on either day 2 or day 3, according to requirements. Only non food items are stored at the Dublin depot. The depot manages deliveries for all customers within the Republic.

Going forward, further proposed operational changes include the introduction of a new picking document enabling goods to be de-picked by line to customer order level and the ability to load product data directly from Excel spreadsheets. This is in order to significantly speed up the set up of new data requirements and react effectively to short timescale demands.

The KDS system is now handling a 50% increase in business throughput. Comparing a single week to the same week 12 months ago, the system managed an increase from 48,000 to 125,000 cases. The KDS system has proved itself to be an agile and speedy solution, capable of being upgraded with new users without incurring big costs or hardware upgrades. This is largely due to the architecture of the software, which allows it to operate efficiently with very limited bandwidth on the network. This coupled with our intimate knowledge of the food service industry, both in the UK and Ireland, puts us into a very favourable position to deliver on customer needs. Our long association with O'Kane has also afforded us depth of knowledge on their business processes and a knowledge of their staff that means we understand both the companies requirements and culture.