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SUPPLY CHAIN
Howe is based in Brother’s head
office in Manchester and has overall
responsibility for procurement,
import/customs, storage and
warehousing, as well as co-ordinating
and planning all of the deliveries to
the company’s channel customers.
You only have to travel a short distance
before you see any number of lorries,
HGVs and delivery trucks on the roads,
but I for one haven’t really given much
thought to how the products we buy for
work and for home, get from A to B. Howe
explained what happens behind the scenes
at Brother and how its supply chain and
logistics infrastructure is geared to provide
a seamless, flexible service to its customer
base.
Two months ahead
Brother printers and consumables are
manufactured worldwide, the company
has ten sites in Japan and its products are
also produced in other facilities in China,
Vietnam, Eastern Europe, USA, Philippines,
Malaysia and the UK. With shipping
typically taking several weeks, forward
planning is essential and orders are placed
well in advance to ensure sufficient stock
is onsite to fulfil customer orders. “We
are always two months ahead of what
we need to do from a purchasing point of
view,” Howe explained.
“We also need to take other factors
that impact on lead times into account, for
example, Chinese New Year means that
we can’t place orders in December, so we
need to bring these forward a month or so
to ensure that stock is received in January.
At any one time we could have between
£8 to £9 million worth of stock in transit,”
he added.
Brother also has a strong presence
across Europe which includes a central
stockholding facility in France and a
warehouse for spare parts in Germany.
“We replenish certain lines from France
once a week and deliver these directly onto
our customers,” Howe said.
Recovery planning is also part and
parcel of the job. “We have to work on
worst case scenario and have a plan B
in place if we’re unable to source from
the Far East, or if there’s likely to be any
delay with the shipping for example,” he
Some 4.3 million Brother products are delivered to customers across the UK each year.
PrintIT Reseller
caught up with Keith Howe, Director of Supply Chain and Service,
to find out more about the company’s supply chain and logistics infrastructure
Logistics in action
said. “If we need to, we can pull products
in from Europe and vice versa. We have
almost instant access to around six weeks’
inventory, we might need to rework the
instruction manuals for example, but
having that flexibility is tightly embedded
into the planning process,” he added.
Working the logistics
Howe heads up a 50+strong in-house
team of logistics and service personnel.
He also manages and oversees the
company’s outsourced services that
includes local storage and warehousing
facilities as well as a large distribution
facility in Lutterworth, third-party delivery
companies, the service division and the
customer service call centres.
The Lutterworth-based warehouse
and distribution centre typically houses
between 10,000 to 12,000 pallets at any
one time. “That’s our basic stockholding,”
Howe explained. All distributor and dealer
orders are managed and co-ordinated
from our head office and the brief for the
transportation of each and every order is
led by Howe and his team.
“Whilst we use a third-party site, it
runs as if it was a Brother owned site,”
Brother also
has a strong
presence
across
Europe which
includes a
central stock
holding
facility in
France and
a warehouse
for spare
parts in
Germany
continued on page 32...
Keith Howe,
Director of Supply
Chain and Service,
Brother
