Executive summary wragg food
704 mots
3 pages
Wragg Food Distribution Ltd. Executive Summary
Background Information
In November 2000, Allfood Holdings acquired Wragg Food Distribution Ltd., a wholesaling company supplying the retail grocery trade. Operating activities were centred on six warehouses that supplied around 2000 retail grocery outlets with a comprehensive range of mainly food goods categorised in market goods (25% of turnover), provisions (15%) and propriety goods (60%). Many of the retailers were small grocery shops (customers for more than forty years) but Wragg also supplied large independent grocery retailers.
Critical issues
A huge issue concerned the warehouse management. There was no common pattern of management or organisation which means that there was little contact between depots and each manager had developed his own methods of management with a great degree of autonomy and a minimum of head office interference (no performance targets were ever set). Only depot managers at Cambridge and Oxford appeared to be of a higher calibre and more involved with company policy matters. Another issue was linked to the high warehouse inventory range which amounted to about 4,000 individual product lines. In addition to this, several of the warehouses were ill structured imposing severe physical restrictions on the staff and creating a significant level of labour inefficiency. A further problem was frequent re-ordering and an excessive proportion of small orders with a special charge of £5.0 which did not compensate for the additional cost involved. This is problematic as having only little scope for price reductions, competition between wholesalers is largely confined to customer service and Wragg would risk losing customers if it restricted the number of orders per week. Another problem was the wide differences in the efficiency of the sales operation: The warehouse in Northampton for example had the highest number of customers per salesperson (55) but the lowest annual turnover per