Roberts Bakery: from a two-day stock count to a few hours

Roberts Bakery has been baking in Cheshire since 1887. Six generations on, it supplies bread to supermarkets and independents right across the UK, but its warehouse was still leaning on manual processes and a stock count that stopped the business for two full days.

When the team came to us, the brief was simple to say and hard to do: keep the bread moving, keep the people onside, and make SAP work for the way the warehouse actually runs.

The challenge

Short shelf life is unforgiving. A pallet that sits an hour too long is a pallet you can’t sell. The existing setup gave the team almost no live view of stock, so counts were done the hard way, on paper, over a weekend, with the whole operation paused.

On top of that, the floor was sceptical. They’d seen systems arrive before that made their day harder, not easier. Any new solution had to earn its place in the first week or it would quietly get worked around.

What we did

We started on the floor, not in a workshop. A few days walking the warehouse told us more than any requirements document, and it meant the design reflected real routes, real bottlenecks and real shift patterns.

• Rebuilt the warehouse structure in SAP EWM around actual pick routes and staging areas.
• Introduced live, RF-driven stock movements so the count is always running in the background.
• Simplified the screens the floor sees down to what they genuinely need, and nothing they don’t.
• Ran side-by-side with the team through go-live so the knowledge stayed in the building.

The result

The stock count went from a two-day shutdown to an afternoon. But the number the team talks about most isn’t on a dashboard, it’s that the floor trusts the system. When people reach for SAP instead of around it, everything downstream gets easier.

That’s the missing link we’re always looking for: the point where what’s possible in SAP and what’s practical on the floor finally meet.