Sainsbury has rejected claims that technical glitches are thwarting its attempts to build a more efficient supply chain.
As part of a complete supply chain systems overhaul, Sainsbury has been developing a website called Infolink. This allows suppliers to log on, call up Sainsbury's purchase order, and build up pallets and advance shipping notes online, automatically pre-notifying Sainsbury of what is going into its depots. It also generates labels, which can be attached to pallets and scanned in at the depot.
Despite months of testing, however, suppliers are still experiencing problems and Sainsbury has no firm launch date.
One source said: "They've had various go live dates, from last summer. Processing orders can take hours, you can't always print off the labels, and then if there is a change, it takes ages to rebuild the pallets on the system, and then you have to go back and change your own systems as well because the two don't integrate."
Sainsbury insisted the system did not impose costs on the supplier base, while electronic ASNs would make the supply chain more efficient.
A spokesman said: "Suppliers have really welcomed this. We never said precisely when we were going to be up and running."


Another added: It's been a huge headache, it's cost a lot of time and money to gear up and we still don't even know if it is going to work."


Separately, moves by Sainsbury to ensure each supplier delivers goods to its RDCS on separate pallets, were also causing suppliers headaches, said one source. "If you are handling inbound freight for other smaller suppliers on your trucks, it's quite often the case that a pallet will have more than one supplier's goods on it.
"Obviously the aim has been to use as few pallets as possible. We are talking to Sainsbury at the moment to find out what the solution is."

{{NEWS }}

Topics