Carrefour's top 20 get up close

French supermarket giant Carrefour has given a glimpse of its three-year strategy for blitzing on-shelf availability using a tiered information sharing network with suppliers.

At a CIES food business forum supply chain conference in Prague, Xavier Hua, business-to-business strategy director for Groupe Carrefour, said only the top 20 "strategic partners" would see the most sensitive information. They would have a high level of integration in the operation and shared responsibility, he said, with daily access to data on stock keeping units (SKU) by store.

But there would be two lower bands with more limited access. Among the bottom 80% of suppliers at "entry ticket" level, manufacturers would be involved in Carrefour's structural and standardised processes. They would have access to key performance indicators for static and aggregated information.

Intermediate suppliers would be involved with what he called "advanced collaboration", with weekly access to transactional information by SKU at distribution centre level.

Franck Mariambourg, director for global customer supply chain development with Kraft Foods supported the call for openness. "We will never get to the right level of end-to-end [supply chain management] without transparency," he claimed. "Most of it will come from the retailer."

Hua said Carrefour's strategy would involve less stock flow and more cross-docking to reduce inventory in the supply chain while avoiding out-of-stocks.