Zetes wins two industry awards in two weeks

Zetes, the supply chain technology specialist has been awarded two of the industrys highest accolades, winning both a CILT Excellence Award and a Retail Systems Award.  The winning entries both came as a result of successful customer deployments with Faber Music and Henderson Group.

Zetes was awarded the top prize in this year's Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) Excellence Awards within the Materials Handling Equipment and Technology category for its work with Faber Music.  The CILT award was won because of clear returns seen by Faber following Zetes implementation of a wireless infrastructure and voice directed picking in the warehouse.  

Since deploying the solution in January this year, Faber has increased order accuracy and cut delivery lead-times by 50%. In addition it has improved staff flexibility, productivity by over 35% and reduced errors to virtually zero.  It has also enabled its customer base to reduce their own inventory levels and reduced the time to market for new products.  A full return on investment for the entire project was achieved within 13 months. 

John Hepworth, Managing Director of Faber Music Distribution, says We at Faber Music are highly delighted to have won this prestigious award.  Being in a small niche industry its wonderful to have received this accolade from the Logistics Industry, not only for Faber Music, but also for the Music Industry. This was a large investment for Faber Music to undertake but I am totally pleased with the outcome, we have more than doubled our projected picking targets with the results and efficiencies far better than expected. We process more orders, more quickly with less staff - what more does one want in this difficult climate!

Zetes then went on to win the Highly Commended Award in the Retail Systems supply chain solution category for its work with food and drink wholesale specialist, Henderson.  Zetes has developed a real time solution for Henderson, which completely transformed their organisation through voice directed picking and giving full traceability through electronic proof of delivery (ePOD).  Henderson now has real time visibility of products from the moment they arrive at the warehouse, to their final destination with the franchisee retailers.  Zetes solution was delivered with no disruption to business levels and achieved a full return on its investment with a year. 

Pat McGarry, Logistics Director at Henderson Group said, We at Hendersons are delighted with this prestigious award and it is indeed testament to the hard work applied by the project team. In addition we are also very pleased with the results of the new system as in the first year we have exceeded our original Business Case expectations by nearly 100%. Zetes were a natural choice for the Medea and Voice picking solution in our Fresh Food warehouse, as they had worked with us before on our installation of Voice in the Ambient warehouse, and we were confident that of a successful outcome.

This is the second year Zetes work with retailers is recognised at the Retail Systems Awards.  Last year, the company won European Solution of the Year for its loyalty card solution implemented at Belgian food discounter Colruyt.

James Hannay, VP for Northern Europe at Zetes said We are obviously delighted to have helped make our customers so successful and have our work formally recognised.  I would like to congratulate Faber Music and Hendersons and also thank all those people involved whose hard work contributed to building these success stories. He adds, In the past 18 months we have seen a very large increase in organizations migrating to voice directed working because of the returns.  The fact that the two organisations winning these awards have also implemented voice really illustrates the clear benefits to business in terms of improved efficiency, productivity and customer service.