Best at availability
Front Cover Contents Chairman’s statement Chief Executive’s review Best at fresh Transforming our stores Product and price > Best at availability >> Safeway and the internet A cleaner, safer environment Best at customer service The Board of Directors Financial review Downloads		We’re keeping our shelves full with the help of new technology while reducing our impact on the environment.
			During the year, we significantly increased our focus on availability of the key promotional lines which feature on our flyers, and this has led to a dramatic improvement, whilst maintaining the levels of availability on core lines which we were achieving last year. Our goal is to continually improve levels of availability, which we will achieve with the help of two new developments, both involving greater control over availability by our store teams at local level. In common with most other sales-based ordering systems, our stock ordering processes have traditionally been managed from the centre. Centrally-driven systems, however, can be inflexible, particularly for products which have a short shelf-life and whose sales vary considerably from store to store. We are removing this weakness by enabling store managers to decide exactly how much stock they need, both weekly and day-by-day, of those products which are most susceptible to local variations on sales and wastage. As a result of this innovation, store managers now have better control over promotional volumes and wastage and can fine-tune their daily stock management to suit local demand. The second development is a new technological aid to the effective management of availability at store level, our innovative shelf-edge computer, winner of the Retail Week Award for Retail Technology Solution of 2001. This is a palm-sized computer which is connected to Safeway’s mainframe system by a state-of-the-art radio frequency network. Our people in stores use these computers to perform many stock control functions, each of which is fed into Safeway’s overall stock position. This means that real-time, accurate stock information is available to our people in stores at any time of day. It also reduces stock replenishment lead times as orders for products which are running low are immediately transmitted rather than delayed until an end-of-day manual stock report is available. This in turn cuts the number of out-of-stocks and, through tighter stock management, further guarantees the freshness of our products. We see a lot of potential to develop this technology, not simply for better stock control but for improving customer service generally. All our stores will have shelf-edge computers by October of this year. The continued rapid growth in our sales volumes has meant that we have needed to add more than 500,000 square feet of extra depot capacity to our logistics network. This includes a new, fast-moving grocery depot in Coventry, a wines and spirits bond at Bardon in Leicestershire, a depot for frozen foods at Willand, near Exeter, and an ambient relief facility at Winwick Quay to support our regional centre at Warrington.
			Our new BP joint venture convenience store format was launched at Sholing, Southampton, in March. This store offers a much bigger range of fresh food, particularly produce and bakery.   The exterior of the new store.   A view of the fresh range.
			Phil Howard, bakery controller, ensures that with all-day baking our customers can always get store-baked bread when they want it. Being best at availability means keeping our shelves full and developing new ways of meeting our customers’ needs around the clock.
			Lawrence Christensen, Supply Director. Lawrence is responsible for getting product from our suppliers to stores, via our depots. He spearheads our goal of having the best availability in the sector and is constantly working to make our supply chain as efficient as possible.
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