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.