What’s it like running the Coulsdon CFC, and what areas does it cover? We have two CFCs in London, here and Greenford, which is managed by a third party. Collectively we cover the majority of London. We’ve got 160 home delivery vehicles and 850 partners. London is a tough battleground for online ordering, and incredibly challenging as there’s so many options. So a model that relies on dedicated fulfilment centres to serve intense city areas takes pressure off local branches.
Waitrose restructured its London CFC network last year with the closure of Enfield – have you taken on more capacity? We split capacity between the two CFCs and are well over a year into that milestone. Generally, we always had the capacity to do larger volume orders. In my time here we’ve probably grown 65%, and a significant amount of those new orders – around 35% – has come during the past year.
The service provided by your driver really stood out. How do you train that? Customers expect a lot from Waitrose, and over the past eight months the partnership has rolled out new service training. It’s not just tickbox e-learning but helping our drivers understand how they can help customers at the door. We talk about delivery on time, but a real focus has been departures on time. That ensures drivers have enough time to do their compliance and vehicle checks, but also a real focus on wellbeing. Ultimately, if they get to a customer’s doorstep and they feel calm, great service comes more naturally.
You also got full marks for availability – why is it so strong? We stock 16,000 SKUs. As we don’t have in-house customers it’s tougher to balance stockholding, shelf life and forecasted orders. So we have to manage our stock flow closely. Since Jason Tarry joined the business, there’s been more investment in improving our internal systems and waste control, and availability has improved as a result.
What’s your approach to substitutions, and how are you working to improve them? The system we use is bespoke to the two London CFCs, so different to those used in branches. It’s an automated stock inventory system that monitors what we have in stock and will auto-sub when the orders drop in the evening. There are always quirks in the system, but we periodically review our rejected subs data to identify the top rejected lines that we might need to remove, or where we could improve our forecasting.
When does your Christmas prep begin, and how is it different to a store’s prep? We’re like any branch store in that we have a seasonal aisle. About 70% of our peak stock is in already. We need to manage our warehouse like a military operation and really protect picking flow and efficiency when we take on extra stock, to avoid bottlenecks and backlogs.
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