FROM UTOPIA DISTRIBUTION
First of all, I’m sorry that things have fallen so far short of what we had been aiming for with the launch of the new site at Bicester. It was always an ambitious plan to find and fit out a site in 7 months, but the lease inherited from Cinram Novum forced the timetable upon us. Without BPI and Government intervention, the original date to vacate the old Aylesbury warehouse was Feb 2023 in order for it to be demolished and replaced with housing.The launch has been far more challenging than anticipated, for a number of reasons, but particularly around two main areas. First, we have 27 trailers of stock still to put away and second, picking in the new site, with lots of new people, needs to speed up considerably. We’re currently around 33% of where we need to be on our picking target, so effectively fall two days behind for every day we’re currently open. We have a backlog of the equivalent of 20 full days picking at the current rate with the tap still on the and bath constantly overflowing.
Therefore we’re taking the drastic step to cancel all orders in the systems, except for New Releases, pause and reset.
We aim to complete ship out for 8th Sep New Releases today (along with Video New Releases for next Monday), with all stock hopefully delivered to customers tomorrow.
We will then enter a 4 day picking pause, starting tomorrow, to focus on stock put away, aiming to make a large dent into those 27 trailers and improve overall stock availability going forward. We do anticipate, worst case, it could take till the end of the month to complete all of the stock put away but much will depend on this weekend. With a full compliment of staff in Saturday and Sunday, only working on put away, a lot of lines will be located into pick locations.
Tuesday 12th we will commence shipping out New Release for 15th Sep music New Releases and 18th Sep Video New Releases, again aiming to have everything out by 14th / 15th Sep respectively. New Release re orders for this week’s titles will also be possible from Tuesday next week
On Wednesday 13th we will assess where we have got to with put away and picking capacity and send a further update, but for now plan for New Release only until further notice.
Again, this was always an ambitious plan born out of rescuing a company in administration with no lease on its warehouse. The resource lacking in that plan was time, not money as has been speculated. We have asked our staffing agencies to supply a further 100 temps to help with the workload, on top of all the staff brought across as part of the move.
Whilst none of the above is either easy to write or digest, I am still confident that this site is the future for physical entertainment distribution in the UK. We have a great partner in DP World who are pulling extra management and supervisor resource from across their network of other UK clients (Apple, Sonos, Jaguar Land Rover) to supplement the UDS team from Aylesbury. Every single person on site knows how critical getting the business back on an even keel in time for Q4 is for all of us.
Your continued patience, support and understanding are much appreciated.
