To make our business more efficient and ensure we control our stock and spending, the Ops and Purchasing team has introduced a ‘virtual warehouse’ for all of our Aggs and Asphalt plants and quarries.  We believe that the UK is the first country in Europe to implement this for CEMEX.

Brendan Scott, Ops and Purchasing Planner, explains the concept: “The idea behind Virtual Warehousing is to manage bulk orders/stock coming in from our LCC sourcing initiative. We have recently taken delivery of our first two bulk orders from China to produce LCC savings.  We have QPI (Conveyor Belting) and CMS (Crusher Spares) as UK partners who will be holding these bulk stocks, they will then issue and fit them as our Aggregate & Asphalt sites call them off.

To manage the stocks, we have set up a Virtual Warehouse so the virtual stock sits in SAP.  As the parts are consumed by sites they are issued from our virtual stocks which enables us to manage the stocks at our partners sites – for the whole of the UK.  This will make ordering easy, make stock control more efficient and help maximise our spending power with suppliers.

Special mention needs to go to Jazz Singh Cheema for liaising with all our sites nationally on their individual requirements and pulling all that together with the new Chinese suppliers to form these bulk orders in the first place.  This is just the start of accumulating requirements to source spares on a national scale to send out for LCC options, watch this space!”