A week further on from my last update and I’m pleased to report continued progress. We are aware things are not moving as fast as we would all like but we are keen to avoid any kind of slip backwards.
The 27 trailers are now down to 5. That represents a little under 1.5m units to still put away. We do know however that 3 of those 5 trailers are particularly “dirty” loads with mostly multi sku pallets, the most difficult and time consuming to put away. In a revision to previous forecasts, we think we’ll have up to 92% of all stock in the pick face by month end but the very end of the tail will carry over into October unfortunately. We will send all clients regular updates on progress with their specific catalogues, but it may be that fresh deliveries of certain titles will get those SKUs into pickable stock locations quicker (where your stock is available elsewhere obviously). The UDS team will update you individually.
As you know, we have tested the water with a very limited sku range of catalogue titles this week. Again, pleased to report we are confident of consistently hitting the 18-20k lines per day target we set. As such, we will be increasing the sku range and will continue to review this on a daily basis. Lisa and her team will be in touch to review your available stock lists straight away.
With New Release effectively back into the old weekly call off routine we will release whatever spare capacity we have each day to get us back to full capacity asap. Returns are also up and running again now. Please make sure your customers are aware of this.
As always, we are relying on you as our clients to keep your customers in the loop. ERA are on copy to help spread the updates but UDS does not have a CRM we can use to be able to communicate direct with retailers. Any lists of what can and can’t be ordered need to come from you having been agreed with UDS. Please make sure your customers understand any old feeds or lists they might have got from UDS previously may very well be out of date. If in doubt, please liaise with customer service.
Many of you have asked for more regular communication so we will step that up, even if the news is “no change”. The aim for next week is to continue to increase picked lines per day. This then in turn gives us the ability to release more SKUs without fear of being overwhelmed by order lines. This process has worked so far, even if it has appeared overly cautious. Again, we’ll continually update on progress and new targets set.
Unfortunately we still can’t say exactly when we’ll be able to offer the full sku range to all customers, but again, we’ll send more frequent updates on progress. We all want as much of the catalogue to be available to as many customers, as quickly as possible, I assure you.
Thanks again for your support and patience.
