# Transcript

BRODIE MCMILLAN
We move around 56 million cases a year. We are second to McDonald's in terms of size in the food service sector. So it's a big, big operation. We work with about 125, 130 vehicles plus rented in vehicles that come in to handle the additional volume as we grow. The volume throughput has grown by 70 per cent in the last five years, 35 per cent in the last two. So handling that is complex.
The way that we do that is to run both the Costa and WHR – Whitbread Hotels and Restaurants – operation under the one roof. That allows us to use the larger vehicles, which we use for WHR, which are 18 tonnes or 26 tonners whereas the Costa workhorse is a 14 tonner. Because we deliver to Costa 24 hours a day, we can get more deliveries done at night. So we use the WHR fleet overnight because they can get more drops. And so we get all the benefit of that within the supply chain, being able to use both fleets, if you like – similarly, the labour and the workforce.
So, in terms of how we try and control that, we keep both businesses, albeit separate, through the same supply chain channel. If you take Kuehne + Nagel, for existence, our partner for food and for consumables, that's going on at many different levels. So there is some straightforward transactional stuff that is also an awful lot of day-to-day activity where we are sitting down and talking and meeting with them.
Trade Team delivers our drinks, for instance. Trade Team is operated on a composite model – not a dedicated model, which this one is. So that requires a different level of engagement, although we are talking to Trade Team about a number of quite exciting opportunities for the future in terms of looking what else we can do with them other than just delivering drinks.

[ON SCREEN] Relationship with customers

Well, it depends how you classify ‘customer’. I suppose each of the brands are our customer because we're responsible for making sure they get what they ordered on time and in full. We are operating at about 99.5, 99.6 per cent availability quota, which is exceptional in our industry. It comes with a cost, but the cost of not delivering it is greater in our opinion than the cost of actually achieving that level. So there's that customer.
And then, clearly, there is the businesses' customer, which is the end user, either the person sitting in the restaurant eating the meal or the person going to bed in a Premier room. And we do a lot of surveys, a lot of customer surveys. There's a lot of feedback that comes into Whitbread.

[ON SCREEN] Delivering on time and in full

The biggest challenge is to make sure that you're delivering the product on time and in full. And that's, I suppose, what drives everything. The consequences of not doing that, clearly, are additional costs. What leads to that going wrong could be as elementary as getting the forecasting wrong, someone making an incorrect entry on to the order level so that the stock hasn't come in.
70 per cent of our stock is what we call ‘over the bank’, which is another expression for just in time. And that's what we call ‘pick to zero’. That's a huge proportion of what's the day's activity. You know, if it's not here, it's not here. If it hasn't come in, it hasn't come in. You're not going to get any more of that whereas the stock items, you can always repick and send out.
But it's not quite the same thing as getting your herbs delivered from Kent into Scotland when the delivery wasn't successful this morning. It's just not going to happen.
We've got people waiting at a hotel or at a restaurant for the delivery to arrive. We work on a one-hour delivery window. So that's how we calculate whether it's on time or not. So the staff is geared to know that, if their delivery's at 10 o'clock, there are sufficient staff there to receive it at 10 o'clock. If you arrive two hours later, the staff won't be there.