Boots The Chemist - Store Planning Division

was invited to carry out a review of the Store Planning Division that is responsible for the design, construction (via contractors) and management of Boots the Chemists stores. After two weeks it was obvious that the problem was much larger than first thought.

The Solution - We reviewed and mapped the current business processes and their finance staff measured the cost of the waste that was occurring. This amounted to 17.5% of Division costs. Based on these overall findings we researched the costs in more depth and were able to identify much higher benefits through re-engineering the high level processes to those in common use in automotive manufacture.

The Result - In the first 3 months £2M was saved from the labour costs. The lead time for 'manufacturing' was reduced from a typical 40 weeks to about 10 weeks. For an average store, the profit loss of each store when being built or re-furbished each week was quoted by BTC as £20,000, or £600,000 per store. As they have over 1,200 stores this can be substantial.

In addition the reducing labour costs, re-engineering of the business had enabled considerable capital cost reduction as modularity was built in to the supply chain. Their estimate was based on an original capital spend budget of £150M per annum. For the same level of activity, a £15M per annum reduction in the capital budget was achieved.