Along the front of the main packhouse is a row of offices, and at the far end – sandwiched between NPD and technical – is a small IT room. This is Brian’s domain. It’s still dark outside and no one is around, but the monitor on Brian’s desk is switched on and a cursor is blinking as words scroll across the screen. It says:

‘Hello gorgeous! It’s going to be a totally awesome day…’

Brian is patently not gorgeous. Krista is, though, and right now she’s perched on one of the picnic chairs outside the goods-in dock, wrapped in her lab coat, watching the sun rise and sinking her first cup of coffee. Her tablet PC says the first truck coming up from port will arrive at 6.20.

‘Gavin! My man!’ shouts Trev, an hour later, on Gavin’s phone, right into Gavin’s ear.

‘Hey Mr Retailer, what’s cooking?’ Gavin replies gamely as he staggers out of bed. ‘The Oppo’s on my radio with some brand new ads, a couple of big promotions, I need an angle from you guys and I need it quickly!’

Back in the IT room, some more words have appeared on the monitor:

Receiving EDI sales orders... Confirmed orders loaded OK... Updating daily planning... Finished with 0 errors and 2 warnings. Alerts have been sent.

There are signs of life in the purchasing department. After a quick scan of his email, Jon opens the materials plan on his computer and clicks Update. No shortages today – that’s good – but he can see from the rolling stock balances on screen that one of the key volume lines will likely run short tomorrow. How has that come about? He drills in to view the details, sees some quarantined stock, picks up the phone...

‘Trev!’ Gavin’s pulling on his jacket, phone clutched to his ear, dashing to the car. ‘Trev, what’s happened to the EDI orders for Marcham? They didn’t come in this morning.’ ‘Nothing for Marcham? That’s not right – well spotted. I’ll phone the numbers through in half an hour.’

Krista has wrapped QC reject tape around four pallets sitting in a pool of water on the floor of the inloading bay. ‘Cool chain problem?’ she types on the tablet, aiming the camera unit and uploading her photo with the full test results. Then she emails the whole lot to her supplier.

At the daily meeting, Alison is organising tomorrow’s production schedule, with some help from Jon and Gavin.

‘Two main changes’, says Gavin, looking at his forecast report. ‘First – we’ve got a competitor promotion starting up. I’ve had some price point data in from the stores team, and we reckon it’ll depress volume on our punnet lines for a week; but we’re working on a fix. Short term I think we will need to scale volumes back. Second, sales of our new-season range are coming in more than 20 per cent up on this week’s programme – and it’s only day three. I think we should raise production and pack ahead as much as we can before Thursday. Jon, can you source it?’

To be continued...