BATTARD

By Tom Brown

Battard was a small $1/2 billion chain of stores and a wholesaler to smaller stores in southern Belgium.

After completing several projects for Delhaize, based in Brussels, I was contacted by its president, Pierre Battard.

I agreed to a visit and they had a car and driver pick me up at my Brussels Hotel and make the 100k trip to the south.  The meeting went fine and I wrote a proposal for a buying system.  I emphasized that I needed to get permission from Delhaize to accept the assignment, and they (Battard) would need to accept my proposal before I would seek the permission.

Pierre and I had a dinner meeting in Brussels to review the proposal and he accepted my terms.

It was not so easy to get permission from Delhaize as they had strong feeling that their consultants should not help their competitors.  I replied that I do not violate confidences, and that they might gain from sharing non confidential practices.  They subsequently agreed.

When my colleague, Ron Dupont, and I arrived in Pommeroeul we stayed in a small, very old inn near the village.  It was 100% French speaking, and so was Battard, except for Pierre. Ron spoke French with a Swiss accent.  His French surname helped as well.

The people at Battard were very smart and very proud of the business practices that they had worked out.  They raised procurement issues that Delhaize had never considered.  My favorite issue was on how our system would build an optimum order for bulk wine pickup in a multi-compartment tank truck with different wines and even different wineries far away in France.  It did.

We installed the system over a year, got good output of the system and good initial results and left them to proceed.

They did not call for a year, and when they did I visited.  Interestingly, the IT Director had reprogrammed our system to more effectively use it on their specific computer.  It was successful.  I fine-tuned a few things and left, noticing that their actual buying and attentiveness to the process was not as good as when we first installed the system.

Then they approached us about redesigning  the warehouse, probably with automated handling of goods.  I did this building on a successful design that I had installed in a US company in Ohio.  They were interested but wanted to see the US site, which I showed them.

The next development was that they told me that some Dutch consultants had looked at the design and thought that I was crazy!  So nothing was done.

I saw Pierre at an industry meeting a year or so later.  There were two developments.

--They had done something very simple to improve the warehouse a little bit.

--He had sold the company to a Dutch company and had been temporarily working for them in the transition.

The Dutch people apparently were poor operators as Pierre told me that Battard was nearly out of business!

I think that Battard started off as a great assignment, with good buy-in to our work and good initial results.

Somewhere along the way Pierre decided to sell the company and lost interest in running the company.

Then they did a minimal fix-up of the warehouse to enable selling the company while the company slowly died.

It was in some ways like Laurel Grocery Company is the US.  Both were too small to have great people who could be leaders below the president.

So when he lost interest it was over.

 

DELHAIZE

By Tom Brown

Delhaize was then in the 1990s a $20 billion retailer with its main operation in Belgium and another operation, Food Lion, in the Southeast US and then a operation in the Northeast, Hannaford.  It is a family controlled operation in the fourth generation.

I first met the CEO, Guy Beckers, at an industry meeting in Berlin, in the early 1980s, where he explained the logic of buying Food Lion in the US.

Then I was invited to give a speech in the late 1980s to the same industry group but this time in Madrid.  The subject was buying and inventory management.  The speech dealt with the logic of buying and inventory management and was well received.  A man came forward and introduced himself as Charlie DeCooman, the family member of Delhaize in charge of buying and inventory management.  He liked the concept that I presented and asked me to visit him in Brussels.  I did so in a few weeks, made a presentation to his people, looked at the operation, which I judged to be a good candidate for our approach and wrote a proposal.

He quickly replied that he wanted to do it, but could not start immediately due to budget limitations, but would be in touch.  He contacted me in December and said he would need to see it in use.  I offered a visit to Affiliated Grocers in Arkansas and he accepted.  The visit went well and he agreed to start in April.

All of the interfaces to our software were worked out and we delivered the system in October and November.  There were some issues in getting initial output that were successfully dealt with.  Also I was starting Tom Brown & Company and Delhaize agreed that I could complete the installation and training with the resources of my new company.  My former company, Case, was paid for the software and had agreed to make an exception to the non-compete agreement for my continued work with Delhaize.

We completed the installation and training in about a year.  The attitude and approach of Delhaize was striking.  Everybody was committed to making the system deliver results.  They did not insist on perfection, but rather a system that made acceptable purchase orders that were better than with their old approach at least 90% of the time.  I visited each month and listened to their issues and  suggested resolutions to them.  They totally “owned” the concept!

We were retained for another year, to continue improving their buying performance and to better integrate buying, transportation and warehousing.  We monitored deliveries from suppliers to see if the trucks were full and efficiently loaded so as to unload more easily and have lower transport cost.  We taught the buying and warehousing staffs to work together and even make visits to supplier facilities to negotiate better methods of ordering and filling trucks for the benefit of both parties.

At the end of the year they had a champagne reception for us at lunch time.  They announced that the system had saved money as promised, thanked me, and said that they would be in touch.  They did not call for a year.

When they did call it was regarding the organization of the perishables warehouse and handling of returnable bottles.  We made recommendations for new methods, layouts and transport scheduling  that were mostly accepted , implemented and successful.

This led to a study of forecasting and reordering.  We developed an approach that was programmed  by the IT staff with some very innovative screens.  We offered a new version of the buying system that would work for perishables.  They accepted the offer and installed it.  However the buyers of perishables did not want a computer generated order so the system languished and faded away.

The last engagement was a short one to survey user needs for the totality of IT support.   I had gotten good at talking with users, often in French, in a non-intimidating way regarding their needs, which IT was not always able to do.

Soon Charlie DeCooman announced his retirement, so that the Delhaize assignment was more or less over.  We remained friends with Delhaize and stayed in touch with different management people.

Delhaize was a great success.  They owned the projects, decided what would work and what would not, and then made it happen.  They trusted us as their consultant totally, not to be confused with blindly doing what I said.

And they gave us extremely well qualified support people.