OUR

Supply Chain

Our wide supply chain provides us with a competitive advantage that is supported by resilience, responsibility, and relationships that enable us to better serve our clients.

Operational and supply chain efficiency are key to keeping our products inexpensive and accessible while also decreasing our environmental impact. Our ongoing investment in technologically advanced systems and infrastructure ensures that we maintain and improve supply chain efficiencies.

Our supply chain has been developed to support the Group’s expansion by increasing efficiency, enabling company growth, reducing waste, minimizing risk, and increasing our total centralisation levels.

Our Focus Areas

Diligently managing our supply chain includes planning, forecasting, procurement, warehousing, and distribution. We manage efficiencies by focusing on three areas:

Building and maintaining a robust supply chain ensures that our business operations run smoothly. This is accomplished by:

Local supplier assistance

We support local suppliers whenever feasible because it allows us to contribute to local economies and grow local and small suppliers while lowering our environmental impact. Our suppliers understand our operational environment and the issues we encounter because we invest in these partnerships.

Managing issues through proactive participation

Our supply chain, from our suppliers to our stores, is highly collaborative, which helps us manage emergencies. Having a high level of control over our supply chain helps us to quickly adopt changes when they are required, which allows us to stay flexible and resilient./p>

We are diversifying our supply network.

We must engage with a diverse spectrum of suppliers, ranging from huge global corporations to small and medium-sized businesses, due to the number and variety of products we must acquire. Increasing adaptation through diversification is critical in developing a resilient supply chain in a changing climate.

Operating efficiently is in our blood. To maintain this sentiment throughout all supply chain operations, we intend to:

Enhance forecasting and replenishment

Our AI-powered forecasting and restocking technology has automated our refill process. Increasing the number of products on the shelf while decreasing overstocking saves waste and the resources required to carry and store products.

Create a dependable and efficient distribution network.

Our vast DC network gets us closer to a wide range of suppliers while also ensuring that our DCs are closer to our stores. We have created the shortest and most responsive supply chain in South Africa by minimizing the distance travelled from supplier to DC and DC to retailer.

In addition to reducing our own impact, we collaborate with suppliers to reduce the overall social and environmental impact of our supply chain.

Supplier participation in social and environmental issues

Our supplier code of conduct addresses a variety of social and environmental concerns. Prospective suppliers are guided via the supplier code of conduct and must agree to it before becoming a Group supplier. Our suppliers are increasingly supportive of initiatives promoting ethical sourcing and sustainable packaging, and they are ready to help the recipients of many of our CSI programs.