"There is a massive demand for this WHSmith News Extranet. We are effectively delivering a business portal with WebIntelligence at the heart of it, providing transparency throughout the supply chain."

Richard Webb, Information and e-business Manager, WHSmith News

WHSmith News Delivers Supply Chain Visibility with Business Objects Extranet

WHSmith News is the UK's leading wholesaler of newspapers and magazines, with 33% and 36% market shares respectively. In the year ended 31 August 2001, it generated sales of £1,024 million and an operating profit of £26 million. The business employs around 4,300 staff.

WHSmith News has a distribution network of 51 warehouses throughout England and Wales. It receives newspapers and magazines in bulk from publishers and distributors on a daily basis and then re-packs and distributes them to over 24,000 customers, ranging from multiples to independent retailers. In addition, WHSmith News provides a number of value added services including category management, information provision and merchandising.
Traditionally newspaper and magazine wholesalers have shared market performance information with distributors and publishers. With the development of an extranet using Business Objects WebIntelligence® WHSmith News is transforming the availability of that information to deliver complete transparency of operational performance, creating new standards of supply chain visibility and forging tighter partnerships throughout the industry.

Business Objects Extranet Delivers

The information provision aspect of the business is gaining increasing focus for the company. As Richard Webb, Information and e-business Manager, WHSmith News, explains, "WHSmith News sits in the middle of the supply chain between magazine and newspaper publishers/distributors and retailers. There are two key aspects to the business: product flows down the supply chain to retailers and information flows back up to distributors and publishers. There is a clear opportunity to leverage our central position in the supply chain to create information transparency between all of these partners."

The information requirements of distributors, publishers and retailers are diverse, with the distributors having the most sophisticated requirements. In the past, WHSmith News had a 12 strong team dedicated to providing information for customers, at a significant cost to the business.
Therefore, having deployed Business Objects WebIntelligence to 300 users internally, the company decided to leverage its powerful information access, query and reporting functionality to deliver customised, self-service customer access to information via a WebIntelligence Extranet. WHSmith News also selected information integrators TAH, a Business Objects' partner that the retailer already worked with, to assist in the implementation and customisation of their extranet solution.

WHSmith News initially piloted the solution with two key trading partners; the successful distributors Marketforce and Comag who were also existing BusinessObjects users. Following the success of this pilot, WHSmith now has 60 users from 15 organisations subscribing to the extranet and expects to eventually have over 1,000 users.

"There is a massive demand for this WHSmith News Extranet. We are effectively delivering a business portal with WebIntelligence at the heart of it, providing transparency throughout the supply chain," said Webb.

Meeting Broad Information Requirements

The extranet provides market performance information which is key for publishers and distributors who need the information to compare the performance of titles across specific retail channels. Additionally, WHSmith News is providing unprecedented visibility of its operational performance via the extranet. "Large distributors, such as Marketforce, are far more interested in WHSmith News' performance: did we distribute product on time, how much overstock is in our warehouses and did we comply to agreements made between distributor and retailer to get product into the marketplace in a certain volume," says Webb. With goods tracked throughout the delivery process, retailers will soon have complete visibility of WHSmith News' performance in meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

For the distributors, in particular, the availability of such operational information both to head office and to field based personnel is reducing the time they have to spend collecting information. "Manual collation of information is disappearing which is a significant cost saving for both distributors and ourselves," says Webb. "The extranet is helping them to make effective decisions and manage the business rather than concentrate on the process of information gathering.

Future Plans

With one third of products unsold and being returned from retailers for pulping, there is a clear need within the industry to improve the quality of forecasting information. "The rapid turnaround of information via the extranet should enable our trading partners to make better forecasting and print decisions at the top end of the supply chain and enable WHSmith News to make better decisions about how we deploy copy throughout the network," says Webb.

The company plans to further enhance the extranet by broadening information sources to include EPOS data as well as new services such as forecasting. This will enable an accurate measurement of product availability during its lifecycle - a key performance indicator for the industry and one that has traditionally been approximated. "Incorporating EPOS data in the forecasting process will truly change the way business is done," he says.

Webb concludes, "WHSmith News' key aim is to be positioned as the industry leading provider of information. We can use the Business Objects extranet to use our position at the heart of the supply chain to generate information transparency and improve business processes throughout. By opening up our entire organisation to complete visibility we are creating very tight relationships with suppliers and customers in a way that we could not achieve without this extranet."