DHL Supply Chain has been selected by the French do-it-yourself (DIY) shop Bricorama to managethe transport and distribution of its e-commerce B2C orders.
DHL said it was selected especially due to its experience in management and optimisation oftransport in the retail sector as well its ability to provide complete service packages combiningdistribution management on the national level with centralised administration. The contract,covering the entire French territory, was signed at the beginning of 2010 but only announced thisweek.
Bricorama, which sells handicraft, garden and decoration products, has a network of 187 storesin Europe, 89 of which are located in France, and employs around 4,300 staff. In 2009, it recordedturnover of €675 million and launched its e-commerce platform Bricoramadirect.fr.
As part of the cooperation, DHL launched a ‘control tower’ to manage B2C deliveries toindividuals and to centralise the distribution of Bricorama e-commerce orders. The control towerallows DHL to manage the transportation of all Bricorama’s e-commerce orders in France.
Each order is handled by DHL directly at one of Bricorama’s 89 locations in France and is thendelivered within 48 hours to the destination chosen by the customer. E-commerce parcels weighingless than 20 kg are delivered to the customer’s home or to the drop-off point in case of absence.Orders weighing over 20 kg are directly delivered to the customer’s home with two deliveryattempts.
Isabelle Veron, e-commerce manager at Bricorama, said: “We started our online business with adifferent management approach than the majority of retailers by establishing a multi-channeldistribution. This approach means placing the store in the centre of the distribution chain ande-commerce value. When an order is confirmed by the user, its preparation is automatically assignedto the store which is the closest to the delivery point. The system also takes into account theinventory levels of the retail outlets in real time. This method is also ecologically important asit minimises the kilometres covered,” she added.
Meanwhile, DHL Supply Chain France has also upgraded its storage services with a new integratedwarehousing solution ‘DHL Proximity’. This combines a network of storage areas covering the wholeFrance with a centralised management solution.
DHL operates the service together with its major partner National Box comprising around 12,500secured boxes all over France. The network of DHL’s independent partners provides more than 400local storage points. DHL Proximity has a total network of nearly 500 sites and dozens of thousandsof storage boxes across the country.
