DE & S
The storage facilities we saw at Donnington had that same sense of awe-inspiring , bewildering scale , but were a masterclass in automation . And some of these buildings were fitted out more than 30 years ago , with what must have been cutting-edge warehousing racks and robots at that time .
“ Donnington was a key site for the Second World War . A lot of the investment that took place happened around that time , so there are some fairly mature buildings on site and there are other buildings which were developed in the 70s and 80s . What you will have seen though , is a more recent investment in the DFC ,” says West . “ The Defence Fulfilment Centre marks a fundamental change in the philosophy of Defence – from storing things to being able to fulfil demands and therefore being able to understand what those demands are and then making sure we ' re responsive to them .”
“ We conduct around 90 % of our fulfilment through that single building , whereas previously we would have been picking stores from right across all of our sites . This wasn ’ t very efficient , and we ’ ve been able to reduce our estate footprint by about a third through this new approach . We ' ve also been able to reduce our manning quite considerably whilst improving flexibility and
13,000 team members in DE & S
£ 10bn
Annual spend
150 Countries we operate in
108 November 2022