JW Filshill is a Glasgow-based fifth-generation business that supplies the KeyStore convenience stores and independent retailers across Scotland and the north of England and national accounts including the Scottish Prison Service.
Filshill relocated from Hillington to new purpose-built premises at Westway Park near Glasgow Airport last year.
The new premises has increased the flow of goods through the system from about 900,000 cases per month at the firm’s previous warehouse in Hillington to a potential optimum capacity of two million cases per month at Westway.
Andrew Allison, Business Improvement Manager, JW Filshill, tells Wholesale Manager about some of the challenges of the project and the benefits the new site brings to the business.
Where have you worked before and in what roles?
I briefly worked as a wastewater engineer after I graduated from university but like quite a few of my colleagues, I’ve been a long-serving member of the Filshill family. In fact, 2024 is my 30th year with the company and in that time I’ve worked in various roles.
While I was studying at university, I worked on the warehouse floor at weekends and during holidays, mainly working in the cash and carry but I frequently found myself picking, shelf stacking or out in the vans as a driver’s assistant.
On qualifying from university, I was offered an IT support role in the office and I remained with the company IT department in various positions for over 10 years. During the IT years, I carried out improvement projects, and when the company decided to introduce the Standard Hour Plan it presented me with an opportunity to tackle a project with a wider scope. From my initial remit of looking at how we could record and report on operator activities it grew arms and legs, eventually resulting in my complete overhaul of the warehouse processes.
This opened the door to move predominately into an improvement role and that is where I have settled over the last few years.
What does your current role involve?
My current role is business improvement. I look for opportunities to find efficiencies, improve safety, and educate and upskill staff.
This can be a very challenging position as it involves a considerable amount of change management, and it’s true that people don’t like change. However, it can also be very rewarding when you see the impact of your work resulting in improvements for the business, colleagues, suppliers and, of course, our customers.
As improvement work interacts with colleagues across the business, often resulting in cross-departmental projects, the role is also part project management. Being able to select and involve colleagues across the business is vital to the success of change – without buy-in by those involved it is hard to overcome the potential resistance, or the change may fail.
The best part of my role within the company is that feeling when the improvement beds in and becomes the normal operation, or you start seeing the culture within the company change – laying the foundation for future opportunities.
Of course, the role does have a downside – the curse of working in continuous improvement is that you can’t rest on your laurels and it might not be long before advancements mean you’re revisiting and looking to disrupt and improve again!
What are your goals for what you want to achieve in the role?
My professional goals are simply to continue to find and implement improvements at Filshill. Of course, it would be fantastic to deliver another large-scale business critical project like last year’s warehouse move and transition, but that type of opportunity doesn’t come knocking very often.
My personal goal is to keep it interesting. Throughout my time at Filshill I have been involved in a plethora of very different projects and activities, each with its own challenges and rewards. For example, I’m currently working alongside the sustainability committee to reduce the company’s environmental impact, delivering workshops to all staff and looking at the best system options not just for tomorrow, but for the day after tomorrow.
How is your company performing?
Financially the market is tough right now for all sectors, including supermarkets, wholesale and convenience. However, we are performing ahead of the convenience market and ahead of last year. Financial performance is only one of the pillars that Filshill measure against.
We are committed to our people and reaching our sustainability targets. Filshill currently has 29 MHFAs and six cancer support ambassadors with over 300 interventions of support given over the last three years. We frequently run awareness sessions inviting third-party organisations to present on a number of topics including Andy’s Man Club, Kickin’ On, Money Matters Scotland, Dyslexia Scotland, and GamCare.
In addition, we are also making inroads into our DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) journey with Filshill providing training for all colleagues in this area. Recent awareness sessions include Hope for Autism and Give Racism the Red Card.
We have ambitious sustainability targets and we are tracking very strongly, exceeding our target by 14%. This has been achieved with investment in two electric HGVs, improved routing efficiency, increased training in this area, and we are looking at other exciting projects to reduce our carbon footprint further.
Tell us about the expansion of Filshill’s warehouse – how much more storage capacity does it give the company and what were some of the challenges of the project?
I believe it is not the storage capacity that is the critical factor but the flow of goods through the system, which has increased from about 900,000 cases per month at our previous warehouse in Hillington. We are working towards an optimum capacity of two million cases per month at Westway.
Of course, being able to store stock in a way that is efficient is key to achieving and increasing flow. We wanted to bring all the stock under one roof to increase cost efficiencies, save time and bolster customer service levels.
We introduced a semi-automated shuttle giving us a block stacking footprint with bulk racking access and multi-floor system for our slower lines in our warehouse solution. We utilised the full height of the building and are able to store nearly double the number of pallets that we could at Hillington within a virtually identical APR footprint while halving the reach trucks required to stock the warehouse.
The dock doors have allowed us to concentrate work streams into defined time periods and we still have capacity to grow without having to re-evaluate current operational methods. The docks have allowed us to drop from a three-person load per vehicle to a one-person load. This equates to over 30% loading efficiency and removes specialist equipment from the process.
The new site also gave us an opportunity to adopt and design into the layout and operating procedures some of the issues raised back at Hillington – changes such as raising the lowest shelf level on adjustable pallet racking (APR) for safe and easy picking underneath, and introducing a one-way traffic system in the APR area to control LLOP movements. We have also created a custom-built Click & Collect lounge.
During the planning stages of this project we gathered information from other businesses that had recently moved warehouse. This helped us to identify where we needed to focus our energies – it was quite a daunting list including significant loss of customers, extensive downtime and stocking issues.
I devised a piece of software to enable us to go live without encountering many of the issues other businesses experienced. As far as I am aware, our “Location Flip” programme is one of a kind – allowing the full set-up and stocking of the Westway site without impacting on the day-to-day business – and is completely transparent to our customers.
It also allowed us to treat the new site as an operational stock warehouse so suppliers could set up the new site on their systems. This made stock purchase ordering seamless with our commercial department able to raise orders for Westway.
We also conducted a complete server and infrastructure refresh, introducing Wi-Fi across the entire site, and increased our data connection capacity to support our plans to reimagine the warehouse operation. We also had the additional issues that the pandemic and the post-Covid fallout presented including chronic labour and material shortages across the construction sector. This extended the build period by almost two years, posing various issues for the business as we had effectively reached capacity in our previous premises and had to turn down new business as we would struggle to provide the level of service we wanted.
However, we struck agreements to gain early access to certain parts of the building, which allowed us to shorten the total fit-out project time and keep momentum going. We were in constant touch with contractors – communication was critical – and we held back on customer communications until the last possible moment to avoid sending out confusing information.
Are you a member of a buying group? If so, what benefits do you get from being a member of the group?
Yes, we are a member of the Unitas Wholesale group. Being a member gives us access to certain scale opportunities and access to other members and suppliers at national events. It can also help reduce the commercial administration.
How far is the geographical reach of your business?
We have customers all over the Scottish mainland and Islands, and the North and North East of England as far down as Leeds.
Do you have an e-commerce site for your customers?
Yes, the Filshill e-commerce website provides a one-stop destination for all our customers’ wholesale food and drink needs – ensuring a seamless shopping experience with preferential prices from over 40 suppliers, all invoiced directly by Filshill. Our customers enjoy the convenience of browsing and ordering online, with the added benefit of our Shopflow suppliers delivering directly to stores.
How digital is your business, and do you offer any IT support for your members e.g. ordering apps, online support, delivery tracking?
Filshill has embraced technology throughout the business, with everything from offering our own EPOS system – Re-Scan – which provides not just a full stock control and transactional system but full price change and promotional control and is supported by our dedicated team. We also offer an optimised routing system and planogram service.
The introduction and uptake of the Filshill app now means that over 90% of our orders are captured electronically, providing a truly 24/7 ordering service. We keep customers informed on their order status as their order progresses through the warehouse and provide tracking links when it is out for delivery. Our app and e-commerce website share a synced basket, meaning you can gap scan in-store throughout the day with the built-in barcode scanner on our app – then later at night finish your basket and checkout on your laptop/PC.
We are big believers in data-driven decision-making and have created a data warehouse allowing us to streamline services for both our suppliers and customers, and have commenced on the journey to embrace machine learning and AI.
How many products does your business supply and what categories do you cover?
Our extensive range comprises over 6,000 products, including soft drinks, confectionery, snacks, grocery, and alcohol.
Are there any new products in the ranges you want to talk about?
Our range is constantly evolving – it’s important that we keep in touch with the latest trends and seasonal variances within our range. We have a carefully considered core across all our categories but even that has to be regularly reviewed as consumer demand changes. An example of this is the medicine range – we would focus on antihistamines during spring/summer and decongestants in the autumn/winter period.
Providing a quality range of products is only one part of today’s consumer demand – they want something new and different, and we understand that NPD is an important part of keeping consumer footfall in our customers’ stores.
How has the wholesale industry changed in recent years?
At Filshill, we are increasing our use of data analytics for determining our customers’ demand, building a full support package to give us and our customers a competitive edge in a tough market. Through data, we are also creating strong bonds with our suppliers.
It is a tough market and there is a greater focus on controlling processes to cut waste and expense to keep the industry competitive. The days of “stack them high and sell them cheap” are fading as we make more informed decisions based on data-driven metrics around demand, availability and margins.
There has been a move towards both ethical and sustainability considerations within the industry, partially driven by a change in customer attitudes, partly by increased regulation of the supplier chain, and also by the values of the company and colleagues.
An example of strengthening bonds with suppliers and moving towards achieving sustainability is that with our geographical coverage, there are more opportunities in third-party supply as everyone strives to reduce food miles.
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