Here is the latest update from Utopia...The move is a complete disater for Record Shops and their customers.
UTOPIA DISTRIBUTION SERVICES – NEW BICESTER WAREHOUSE UPDATE
Dear Customer,
After our blackout period where we moved our entire warehouse including stock, systems and staff we are now live in our new Bicester facility. A move of this scale has never been done before, moving all clients in one go into a brand new distribution centre. It was an ambitious project with ambitious timelines and despite a monumental effort from everyone involved we have experienced some issues in our first few days of launch.
There are a few key areas where you will notice an impact to service levels, these are highlighted below –
Order Fulfillment –
We moved over 15 million units of stock and are still working on putting away transfer loads to get all SKU’s available. This exercise will continue over the coming weeks by which time we hope to have something of everything available for order.
We have also had to make a difficult decision to intentionally short ship some order lines, in part or in full if we do not have stock available in our pickface locations. We are working hard to profile the stock into the correct locations to minimise this going forward.
The stock position is improving every day so please continue to re-order priority lines.
Outbound SLA’s –
We knew that we would not be at full capacity from launch and as expected we are experiencing delays in servicing replen orders. We are doing our best to ramp up the order lines picked and each day we are seeing an improvement, but it will take a while before we back to our normal service levels.
New Release -
Our number one priority is to try and minimise any impact to new release and although your delivery may not arrive in line with our normal delivery schedule for release dates of the 8th & 11th September we still aim to ship everything prior to release.
Returns –
In our previous communication we advised that our Returns department would be operating from Monday 4th September. We have taken the strategic decision to refocus all our efforts on improving our outbound service and will therefore push this back by two weeks and will now start processing returns from Mondy 18th September. Any parcels received back prior to this date will be held.
Thank you for supporting us during our black out window and for your patience whilst we navigate some of the challenges experienced in our first few days of launch.
Despite these issues, a lot has gone right and we are extremely confident that we have the right facility, and team, to secure physical distribution within the UK for the future.
If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact your usual your usual client account manager, Customer Services at UDS (ordersaylesbury@cinramnovum.com) or ERA who are fully aware of our situation and very supportive in helping to facilitate any queries.
