As the manager in charge of the wor

As the manager in charge of the world's largest supply chain, Keith Harrison believes the time has come to give the business of logistics more credit. The Head of Global Product Supply at Procter & Gamble believes the search for a competitive edge will focus more on supply-chain efficiency as retailers and suppliers battle huge increases in raw material and energy costs. 'Today you have road congestion; you have freight costs, driver shortages, capacity issues. Working capital is at a premium. Competition among retailers and vendors is higher. All of this is putting pressure on having a more efficient supply chain. This is more critical than it has been before.'

Since his appointment in 2001, Mr Harrison has been at the forefront of efforts to drive costs from P&G's supply chain, helping the company meet its long-term sales and earnings growth targets, in spite of surging input costs. But he says P&G has also been looking increasingly over the past three years at ways to turn improvements in the supply chain into top-line sales growth. 'We're trying to make the supply chain into a growth engine for the company,' he says. 'A lot of the time, supply-chain management is reactive, or passive, cost control. But we think there's also an opportunity for us also to use the supply chain to create top-line growth as well as bottom-line performance.'

An effective supply chain helps manufacturers by reducing a retailer's 'out-of-stocks', which in turn prevents lost sales. Those sales also benefit the retailer, while efficient delivery of products to meet demand can also reduce the costs of holding inventory to the retailer.

P&G is telling retailers that it should be rewarded for the benefits its supply chain delivers. 'If I do something with my supply chain to reduce my customer's inventories, I want more than just the "supplier of the year" award,' he says. 'How do we get that value that we've created at least partially reinvested in growing our business?

Do we get sharper pricing, better features, more display, better shelving?'

As an example of the potential benefits, Mr Harrison gives the example of a pilot project with Wal-Mart in the US, whose worldwide stores account for 15 per cent of P&G's overall sales. The two established a cooperative relationship in the late 1980s, starting with Wal-Mart's decision to allow P&G and other suppliers access to the customer sales data collected by its Retail Link computer system.

Over the past 12 months, a P&G factory in Missouri has been using live sales data from stores not to forecast demand but to schedule replenishment deliveries on a store-by-store basis for a single test product. Rather than shipping the required volume to a dis?tribution centre, where it is then divided up for each store, the shipments are instead prepared at the factory for the right store. When the goods arrive at so the Wal-Mart distribution centre, they are moved directly from P&G's truck to the appropriate Wal-Mart truck, with no time in storage. 'It is assembled for a store, and it is just flowing through the system,' says Mr Harrison.

Kevin O'Marah, a logistics consultant at AMR Research, believes P&G is the first consumer goods company to use the Retail Link data in this way.
Cost control
Inventory
Replacement deliveries
Road congestion
Sales data vendor working capital