Conwy Borough County Council (CBCC) is the local authority for Conwy County Borough, one of the unitary authority areas of Wales. CBCC brought together three former departments, Environment, Roads and Facilities, covering facilities, open spaces, traffic and network management, finance and customer services, and transport and waste, into a single department known as ERF.
To capture the opportunities created by this restructure, CBCC decided to consolidate nine existing sites into one. CBCC engaged The Supply Chain Consulting Group (SCCG) to help design and lay out a single, optimised and cost-effective warehouse facility, while reviewing current operations to identify the most suitable operating procedures, ERP and inventory management tools for the new site.
Each of the nine sites had been operating independently, with its own procedures and its own approach to warehouse and inventory management. SCCG’s task was to understand current practice across all nine and define a single ‘best-in-class’ process and procedure for the consolidated site, supported by a common warehouse management system (WMS).
SCCG’s supply chain and logistics consultants carried out a complete end-to-end process review, covering order processing, asset management, storage, receipt and despatch procedures, resource maintenance and inventory control. This review, and an overview of CBCC’s business activities and future plans, fed into an analysis of the existing operation, highlighting key findings and recommendations for improvement.
Using a throughput activity model to represent the current operation, SCCG developed optimised facility layouts, inventory storage plans, and marshalling and despatch areas. Recommendations were prioritised by ease of implementation and business benefit, giving CBCC a clear roadmap rather than a single all-or-nothing plan.
Following the warehouse operations review, CBCC brought in SCCG’s logistics consultants for further support, commissioning a new site design layout and a WMS operational requirement specification to support the newly optimised workflows and processes, extending the original review into a full, implementation-ready design.
By reviewing nine independently run sites end-to-end and translating the findings into a prioritised, best-in-class design, SCCG gave Conwy Borough Council a practical path to a single, optimised warehouse operation, one that CBCC has continued to build on through further site design and WMS specification work. Talk to our warehouse consultants about consolidating multiple sites into one optimised facility.