SABMiller Subsidiary: Lesotho Brewery Company
Lesotho Brewery Company (LBC), a subsidiary company of SABMiller, supplies soft drink and beer products throughout Lesotho. Lesotho Brewery Company has five depots situated in Maseru, Mafeteng, Maputsoe, Butha-Buthe and Mohales hoek. The company has one production plant in Maseru. Distribution and warehousing take place out of the depots in Maseru, Mafeteng and Maputsoe. The depots at Butha-Buthe and Mohales hoek serve as warehousing depots. Customers serviced from these depots, collect orders since no distribution channel exists.
LBC undertook to change their distribution strategy at the end of 2006. The company had previously delivered to only a small number of larger customers and embarked on changing more customers from ‘collecting’ customers to ‘delivery’ customers. ‘Collecting’ customers are characterized by the fact that these customers collect their orders directly from the depot. ‘Delivery’ customers are identified by the fact that their orders are delivered to them by LBC.
LBC also changed from delivering beer and soft drink products on separate vehicles to combining deliveries for all products on the same vehicles. Since the volumes and number of customers delivered to increased drastically, a routing and scheduling tool was needed to ensure that the distribution of goods was done in an efficient and effective manner. FLO was thus implemented to generate daily routes and schedules.
In the beginning of 2007, LBC decided to combine their Maseru and Mafeteng depots. All customers would thus be serviced from the Maseru depot. This meant that FLO would be used to create routes and schedules for the delivery of goods for both Maseru and Mafeteng customers.
SABMiller, together with OPSI Systems, are currently looking into a way of aligning all of the African countries currently using FLO, namely, Angola , Swaziland, Botswana and Lesotho to create a footprint for other subsidiary companies to implement FLO.
