MHD SUPPLY CHAIN
ELEVATE SETS THE PACE FOR SUPPLY CHAIN INNOVATION AND TRANSFORMATION As media partner of Körber Supply Chain’s inaugural Elevate APAC conference, MHD attended a number of roundtable sessions. The must-see supply chain event featured topics such as diversity, sustainability and change management, alongside many customer success stories.
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ith more than 45 sessions across three days, Körber Supply Chain’s Elevate APAC conference was jam-packed with roundtables, virtual facility tours and group activities to ignite collaboration and innovation. Having delivered some of the region’s largest transformation projects, Körber’s Elevate presented a chance to hear from Australia’s most innovative businesses. The roundtable discussions created a unique opportunity for organisations to reflect and share how they have dealt with the growth and challenges of the last 12 months. Ryan Parker, Supply Chain Project Manager at Catch Group says the pandemic has been both an exciting and challenging time for the leading retailer. “We’re on a steep growth curve and the pandemic has thrown us a number of challenges,” he notes. Being able to build a resilient supply chain has been absolutely critical to Catch’s success. “Until recently we have operated from one DC in Victoria. That comes with its constraints, so we’ve had to ensure our network initiatives allow us to be flexible and resilient,” Ryan says. Improving storage capacity, picking and packing with the deployment of Körber’s AMR solution has played a key role in the retailer being able meet its customer promises. “We’re going to be expanding our
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Female senior leaders met to question what needs to be done to attract more women into supply chain. footprint into new markets with the commission of a Brownfield DC in Sydney. This is a key part of our principle of creating a resilient, flexible and scalable supply chain that’s as close to our customers as possible,” he adds. Similarly, Officeworks saw a 200-300 per cent growth in online demand, according to Tom Weinmann, Head of Transformation at Officeworks. “One of the most effective ways that we managed demand was to utilise our store network. We managed to maintain our existing service levels for or customers by utilising the true online pick and pack capabilities we had built in store,” he says.
Officeworks also invested in a new DC in Victoria, with scalability and flexibility at the core. “The new DC is triple the size of what we had previously, and we’ve partnered exclusively with Körber, from WMS all the way to AMR tech – this will set us up for our next phase who of growth.”
THE STEPS TO A SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY CHAIN Hayley Jarick, CEO at the Supply Chain Sustainability School says that as the world becomes more interested in supply chain as a result of global disruptions and delays, there is more of an emphasis on sustainability than ever before.
