Digital Transformation in Logistics at Culina Group

In 2016, Culina turned to Arena Group and the mstore solution to help realise a vision of applying technology to enable efficiency benefits that would impact positively on the experience of their prestigious customer base.

About the Client

Culina Group offers a series of high-quality logistics solutions via its network of strategically located sites across the UK and Ireland. At the heart of its proposition is the provision of warehousing and transportation services for chilled and ambient food and drink products.

Brand performance and technology

Culina Group is proud to be trusted to handle the supply chain requirements of some of the world’s biggest, best and most recognisable food and drink companies. At the same time, Culina Group has a proven track record when it comes to assisting start-up brands and niche manufacturers with their logistics requirements, helping them to blossom into the leading food and drink businesses of tomorrow.

Systems are one of five efficiency benefits Culina Group offers to its clients. Culina Group invested over £2.5m in its systems infrastructure in 2013 and 2014, ensuring it’s operational and customer service functions have the platform from which to deliver on customer expectations. The investment continued throughout 2015 and 2016, with projects drawn up to further develop Culina Group’s web portals and satellite tracking systems.

Reducing paper and increasing visibility

In early 2016 Culina began to work with Arena to build a fully customised, digitised proof of delivery (POD) storage and retrieval system, mstore. Since its implementation in 2017 and with continued assessment, support and development, mstore has proven to not only streamline the process of POD handling but has also displayed a marked reduction in both paper handling and paper.

Head of customer services, Sarah Toth explains, “Our clients have full visibility to the online portal giving them real time information about their supply chain, what was dispatched and delivered, assisting Culina in meeting expectations and requirements 365 days a year.”

Realising more paper-free operations

Sarah continues, “The idea of a paperless office, and more broadly a paperless society, is something we are all striving to achieve. Paper, after all, is an old technology that’s not terribly efficient and is environmentally expensive.”

“The reality though is that we still use a lot of paper and with this comes the need for greater security,” “With mstore we have reduced the amount of manual data entry required, assisting in time management enabling Culina to give a higher level of customer service,” confirms Sarah.

Arena’s mstore solution for Culina is primarily an intelligent electronic document management (EDM) system which captures, stores, and enables Culina and its clients to retrieve documents by using one of several references. But the team also realised the potential of dashboard technology.

Leveraging the power of real-time data

Culina, like many businesses, collects and processes a lot of data. By applying dashboard management information over this data, Arena is able to provide the management team with the ability to make decisions real-time. As chilled foods have a very short shelf-life, real-time data and agile ways of working are critical to their business. For example, a haulier is responsible for the goods in their care. Understanding if a delivery is refused as quickly as possible is very important to enable the right response in a timely way to protect cash flow and positive client relationships. mstore with the dashboard capability enables Culina to keep a tight hold on what’s happening at all times.

The benefits

“mstore has provided many key benefits to Culina, such as storage space reduction, enhanced security, easy retrieval of documents, improved client relations, productivity and to remain environmentally friendly,” confirms Sarah.

Working in partnership to achieve the vision

“Environmental sustainability is the vision,” explains Sarah. “What we do today must not affect the quality of life for tomorrow.”

“Culina Group is committed to future proofing its business,” concludes Sarah, “and in partnership with Arena this will continue to improve processes.”