It’s the supply chains that are directly competing,” he says. “Companies are no longer in competition with other companies. Henry Ford may have raised the cows used to produce the leather on his vehicles’ seats, but modern companies are more like football teams, with specialised players in individual roles. Richard Wilding, a professor of supply change management at the Cranfield School of Management, said the disruption revealed the extent to which companies have become compartmentalised. It apologised for the “unforeseen interruption” and said: “Whilst we are not the only party responsible for the supply chain to KFC, we do apologise for the inconvenience and disappointment caused to KFC and their customers by this incident.” We are all agog to see what has actually gone wrong.”įor the moment, DHL remains tight-lipped about the fiasco. “You would think if you team with a company you have worked with for years in Europe and pair it with the biggest logistics operator in the world it would be a safe bet. If you are serving 900 sites from one warehouse it’s difficult,” he says. Malory Davies, the editor of Logistics Manager, said: “It’s not necessarily a bad choice to have one location, but the scale is the challenge. Much of the speculation for the cause of the disruption has centred on the fact that DHL has one centralised warehouse, in contrast to the previous contractor, Bidvest, a specialised food distributor that operated from six. An unspecified number are imported from other European countries, Brazil and Thailand, according to its website.

KFC sells around 676m pieces of chicken a year and buys 450,000 birds a week in the UK. From egg to slaughter is around 35 days, with most chickens gassed, plucked, cut up into saleable pieces and distributed to temperature-controlled warehouses before being sent in refrigerated lorries to outlets. The logistics of fresh chicken are fiercely regimented, according to Owens. “I think they’ve been caught out by the speed and the limited amount of space there is for error with such a highly perishable product.”Ī KFC apology advertisement in some newspapers.

“I’ve never heard of anything go down so quickly, it’s been absolutely shocking,” said Dr Jonathan Owens, an expert in operations management and the supply chain at the University of Salford business school. By 16 February, KFC had started to shut down locations after managers complained of delays to deliveries and by 18 February only 266 of 900 restaurants in the UK were open. So where did it all go wrong? The “new delivery partner”, otherwise known as the behemoth DHL, took over the KFC logistics contract on Valentine’s Day, alongside Quick Service Logistics (QSL), which has supplied KFC in Europe since 2011. There were reports of desperate managers attempting to bulk-buy chicken from supermarkets, and of frustrated attempts to give away surplus chicken in a storage depot that the local council confirmed had not been registered. “We’ve brought a new delivery partner on board, but they’ve had a couple of teething problems,” it said in a statement. The crisis soon spread, however, leading the company to point the finger at its new logistics partners. KFC was brief and somewhat sheepish in the statement posted in its shops, saying there had been “a few hiccups with the delivery today”. Please do not contact us about the #KFCCrisis - it is not a police matter if your favourite eatery is not serving the menu that you desire.- Tower Hamlets MPS February 20, 2018

Crazy deliveries