Godrej Consumer Products Ltd

Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL) has strengthened the Replenishment and TOC processes further in 2016 to make their supply chain even more agile and flexible. A pioneering initiative in this regard is bar coding at the shipper level, which provides a unique serial number to each shipper, besides providing other information like SKU, batch code, manufacturing line, date of manufacturing, etc. It helps the company not only in inventory tracking, but also in enforcing FIFO in warehouses. One of the KPIs used is freshness of stocks in days at the time of invoicing to customers. GCPL’s freshness indices have improved after this initiative.

Since they are on Replenishment and TOC, their supply chain can handle a large number of SKUs without any adverse impact on availability and inventory metrics. Of course, it requires the production system and vendors to be more flexible in terms of smaller batch sizes. Techniques like SMED and Lean Manufacturing have been instrumental in creating this flexibility in production lines. “Our continuous improvement work with vendors has helped in getting smaller lots and more frequent supplies from them for our raw and packaging materials. We are overall geared to handle higher variety in our consumer offering,” states Sinha.