[#90] Supply Chain in Numbers - Aug 30, 2021
No milkshakes in UK McDonald's, Parcel Perform raises $20M, Target is planning four sortation centers, Amazon's Delaware DC has $3K signing bonus, Grocery delivery time is more important for shoppers
Welcome to “Supply Chain in Numbers.” This newsletter tracks significant digits from the world of the supply chain. Five prominent numbers are published every Monday. If you have any feedback, please send it to me.
1,250 McDonald’s
McDonald’s says it has pulled milkshakes from the menu in all 1,250 of its British restaurants because of supply problems stemming from a shortage of truck drivers. The fast-food chain says it is also experiencing shortages of bottled drinks. Industry body the Road Haulage Association says pandemic restrictions over the past 18 months have delayed many new recruits taking their driving tests. The group says Britain is short about 100,000 drivers, from a pre-pandemic total of 600,000. [AP News]
$20 million
Singapore-headquartered Parcel Perform, which connects merchants with e-commerce carriers and provides shipment tracking features, has raised $20 million in a new financing round as it scales its business in several parts of the world. The SaaS startup helps improve the experience of e-commerce merchants and their customers when engaging with carriers. Parcel Perform also provides these merchants with tools to create additional touch points after the checkout to create higher brand loyalty with customers, opportunities to move more inventories, and it has also developed a system to support more than 30 languages to offer the most personalized experience to customers. [Tech Crunch]
4 sortation centers
Target plans to open four new sortation centers this fall in Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia and Lawrenceville, Georgia markets. Removing the sortation process from the backroom and stores and moving it to a dedicated facility will help free up space and time within retail locations, Target said. The sortation centers will get deliveries from stores and sort them for delivery partners like Shipt. Target says the pre-sort process and the technology at the sortation centers will also help to lower processing time for delivery partners. [Supply Chain Dive]
$3,000 signing bonuses
Employees at Amazon’s new fulfillment center near Newport, Delaware can receive a signing bonus of up to $3,000. It’s a limited-time offer as the e-commerce giant sets up operations at its state-of-the-art facility on the grounds of the former General Motors plant. Amazon has hired about 500 employees for the fulfillment center and intends to hire about 500 more before the end of the year. This five-story, 3.8-million-square-foot-facility is what Amazon calls a “sortable fulfillment center.” [Delaware Online]
10.8 hours longer
Online grocery shoppers place a higher priority on being able to choose when their order will be delivered than on how quickly it will show up, according to research released Monday in the MIT Sloan Management Review, a magazine published at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Customers are willing to wait 10.8 hours longer for their goods to arrive in return for shortening the delivery window by an hour, and 7.5 hours longer if they schedule it for the day of the week they prefer, the researchers concluded. The study’s findings differ from research showing that speed matters most to people who place orders for groceries using eCommerce channels. [Grocery Dive]