WHSmith News is the UK’s leading newspaper and magazine wholesaler, delivering 50 million newspapers and magazines to 22,000 retailers in England and Wales each and every week.
It operates 24 hours a day, 364 days a year with a workforce of more than 4,500 employees and 1,000 contractors.
The distribution of newspapers and magazines is governed by contracts awarded to wholesalers by publishers for specified regions. WHSmith News operates 45 distribution centres (known as houses) throughout England and Wales.
WHSmith News is driven by good service, customer needs and getting the right product in the right place at the right time. It operates one of the fastest moving supply chains in the world as it needs to meet the demands of the 500 publishers it serves as well as its retail customers daily.
Compatible technology
This intensively time-sensitive, high volume business requires a robust information system as WHSmith News handles £3.6 million worth of product every day. Clear communication between retailers and their local house is essential and there is a continuous process of ordering, receiving and dispatching products as well as dealing with returns.
Each part of the process needs to be tracked and accompanied by the relevant paperwork to ensure accountability. This includes packing sheets, delivery notes, re-call notes and invoices. WHSmith News uses the forms processing package Planet Press, alongside its SAP system, to insert data into each of six different standard forms and combine as one print job. WHSmith News has further developed Planet Press to increase the solutions’ stability and scalability to withstand the demands of the business.
NRG (originally as Lanier) has been providing back-up printing services to WHSmith News throughout England and Wales since 2003. This means that if there is a fault with the first line printing, the function is switched to NRG devices. NRG also supplies multifunctional products and printers to the main offices. These networked devices print, scan and copy, producing fast, cost-efficient and quality output in mono and colour.
High level - customer support
Jason Fletcher, National Accounts Manager at NRG, works closely with the CoreServices Team at WHSmith News to ensure that they receive the highest level of customer support. He explains: “If WHSmith News cannot print their order documentation, then they cannot fulfil the order. It’s crucial for their operation. Every stage in the process has to be managed to the finest detail so support is paramount.”
NRG is working with the Core Services Team at WHSmith News to increase visibility and control over their networked NRG print devices. NRG successfully implemented its e-Service solution, which is available to key staff at WHSmith News throughout their 24 hour a day operation. The Core Services Team can log on to the eService website to submit meter readings, order supplies or request service calls at any time. Early findings have shown that this has contributed to NRG’s increase in speed of service response, with an 8% reduction in response time in the last quarter.
Sarah Beach, Core Services Team Leader added: “eService is very easy to use and allows us to log service calls outside the hours of the NRG helpdesk. We can check engineer appointments and close calls when everything has been dealt with. NRG is the only supplier to offer this kind of service. We still speak to the NRG service team but eService gives us all the information we need.”
NRG is looking forward to introducing @Remote (see page 20) to WHSmith News so all NRG devices across the company will be polled automatically for meter readings to help to ease administration and free up time.
Jason Fletcher concluded: “We continue to re-evaluate our processes and have a great opportunity to build on this in the future with exciting solutions suited to bespoke and high volume forms processing and data printing environments.”
