23/11/2009

By Scott Thompson

Halfords has chosen Manhattan Associates as its technology partner to support its future distribution network.

The retailer will deploy a range of solution components from Manhattan's Distribution Management suite, including Warehouse Management, Labour Management and Slotting Optimisation as well as its Supply Chain Intelligence solution, as the retailer seeks to build an optimised fulfilment capability to extend the success of its multi-channel retail operations.

It has already launched phase one of its strategy to consolidate and reconfigure its logistics infrastructure, which will result in the opening of a new national distribution centre (NDC) in 2010. The restructured network, which will comprise the NDC and an existing DC at Redditch, will serve Halfords' network of almost 500 stores in the UK, Republic of Ireland and Central Europe, as well as handling customer orders received through its online store.

"Our optimised distribution infrastructure will improve service levels to our customers while providing transportation efficiencies and increasing productivity," says Tony Smollett, head of systems at Halfords. "This revised distribution network needs to accommodate our growth ambitions across the business. We therefore needed a scalable supply chain technology backbone that would reliably serve the new DC network and meet our cross-channel fulfilment requirements and allow us to introduce various flow-through techniques including cross-docking. We selected Manhattan based on our experience of working with them previously, the ease of integration of their systems with our existing SAP enterprise resource planning platform and the flexibility of their solutions."