Fact Sheets

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Smiths News facts

  • 60 depots, delivering to 30,000 retail customers, 364 days a year
  • 5,500 employees and more than 1,200 contractors work across 24 hours a day
  • 154,000 deliveries a week
  • 1,500 delivery runs a day
  • 73m newspapers and magazines distributed a week
  • 11.5m returns processed each week
  • 70,000 retailer calls taken by our customer service teams each week
  • c900,000 sq ft of warehouse space
  • one newspaper sales centre managing copy allocation for 30,000 customers
  • one magazine sales centre managing copy allocation for 30,000 customers
  • one national accounting centre billing nearly 7m invoice items every week

IT support

  • One of the largest SAP installations in the world, handling complex tasks 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
  • 300m items scanned every year
  • 10m standing order records loaded daily
  • 142 gigabytes of database growth a month
  • 24/7 web access to accounts for retailers and publishers

Store support

  • 3m retailer calls handled by Smiths News every year
  • 2,800 magazines titles
  • 669 newspaper titles
  • 10,586 stores visited during 2007/08
  • 30,000 retailers served
  • £19.00 smallest weekly invoice
  • £27,000 largest weekly invoice

Logistics

  • 1.6bn newspapers and 800m magazines a year delivered by Smiths News
  • 1,550 delivery runs a day
  • 61 warehouses
  • 1,750 delivery vehicles in use
  • 400m supplements distributed a year

 Market Forecasting

  • 2.5bn supply, returns and claims analysed by Smiths News every day
  • 800,000 EPoS sales records analysed each day
  • 1.5bn sales items analysed every day
  • 77m customer supply figures forecasted a year
  • 15m magazines stored and replenished every year

Distribution

  • 30,000 retailers across England and Wales served by Smiths News
  • Newspaper Pack Accuracy – 99.8%
  • Magazine Pack Accuracy – 99.7%
  • On Time Delivery – 98%
  • Newspaper Returns Collection On-Time – 98.3%
  • Magazine Returns Processing Accuracy – 99.9%