As Christine Tacon's tenure as Groceries Code Adjudicator comes to a close, we are proud to share the success of the Drop & Drive Claims Workgroup which after five years of collaboration has delivered an 85% reduction in unsubstantiated claims through process improvement plus numerous positive impacts on workload and job satisfaction too.
For any chilled suppliers not benefiting from this, read on, as you should be benefitting from this too.
Before the existence of the collaborative workgroup pioneered by Simply Supply Chain, unsubstantiated discrepancies relating to drop and drive were costing UK chilled suppliers millions (c£15M p/a for the 20 original group members). Depot errors, poorly labelled goods plus lack of any auditable retailer systems led to tens of thousands of cases of food/drink items being claimed as short delivered every week. With no way of proving otherwise, suppliers ended up facing endless calls and paperwork, just to be left unpaid for goods they had delivered.
READ: Latest article in The Grocer on Drop & Drive, May 2020
The initiative has achieved its success by working with suppliers and retailers alike, to deliver innovative win-win solutions across the board, from simple and effective labelling to GFR (Good Faith Receipting). One member supplier confirmed, “…it works from both sides. From a retailer’s point of view, it’s put some focus for them in terms of how they receipt and move the goods through the business. From our point of view, we are a lot more confident now that they get received in the right way.”
Christine Tacon, GCA, has endorsed the programme as part of a closing press release by recently commenting, “I appreciate all the work that the members of the SSC working group put into addressing an issue which I had raised as a serious concern to suppliers to the regulated retailers. Their willingness to collect and share data with retailers has been helpful in highlighting the issue and they got under the skin of the issue to work on practical solutions with retailers. In so doing, many other suppliers have benefited from their work; both supplier and retailers have a more efficient solution and the GCA survey has shown a continued improvement in performance in what has been a long-standing problem.”
Member satisfaction demonstrates just how worthwhile participation is: In a 2020 survey of members, when asked ‘How likely are you to recommend Drop and Drive to a colleague/peer?’ our average score was 9.7 out of 10 ─ and our NPS was +100.
Interested in joining the workgroup?
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