Deliveries of Doc M packs for the year to date are running at £2m ahead of the same period in 2018, marking an incredible recovery from stock availability issues.
At the same time, a large backlog has been cleared and safety stock built up in the Armitage warehouse to ensure swift delivery to customers.
UK Supply Chain Director Adrian Storr said: “This recovery has been a fantastic effort by a number of people but in particular the order fulfilment and pack build warehouse teams, and factories in the wider group business.
“We are now in a position to leverage our market leading position on Doc M packs, which could be a major contributor to the achievement of targets this year.
“Our sales colleagues can also go out to customers with the confidence that we can supply product for their projects on time and in full.”
We offer about 70 different variants of Doc M packs, which contain multiple components and colour finishes, according to the needs of the customer.
At the start of 2019, we had a large backlog of overdues because of product availability issues, mostly because of one ceramic piece and two brassware pieces.
This was made up of 639 packs comprising 40 variants with a value of £715,000 whereas today we have 25 overdue packs with a value of £7,600 and made up of nine variants.
Stockholding in the Armitage warehouse has also been built up so we have a safety stock of just over 2,000 packs (above) which can be offered on a next load delivery basis, compared to up to eight weeks at the height of the stock issues.
Sales are being supported by a marketing campaign which highlights our unique ability to support specifiers with compliance to Part M of the Building Regulations, which governs accessibility of washrooms, among other things.
The turnaround has been made possible by improvements in component availability at the factories in Wittlich, Germany, Teplice, Czech Replublic, and in Sevlievo, Bulgaria, which has in turn enabled the UK order fulfilment and pack build teams to reduce the backlog.
Better pack availability has also allowed the sales teams to engage with our merchant partners to begin developing Doc M pack ranges in their business to pick up sales for smaller projects which historically we would have missed.