Harris Teeter 1999 Annual Report Download - page 9

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1999 Annual Report
stores. These initiatives include more in-depth employee training and cross-training, engineered labor stan-
dards, sales planning based on customer data and enhanced inventory management and waste reduction
efforts. Harris Teeter’s Hunter Dairy installed new milk silos that enabled it to lengthen milk runs for greater
efficiency and reconfigured freezers in order to increase capacity and produce better quality ice cream.
We have also improved the quality and consistency of the hallmark “fresh food” items that customers
can expect to find in all of our stores by utilizing a variety of sourcing strategies to prepare our products. In
addition, we began the redesign and restructuring of the store square footage dedicated to fresh foods and
implemented standard operating procedures after identifying best practices.These activities allowed us to focus
more aggressively on the industry-wide challenge of improving profitability in this product category.
AMERICAN & EFIRD
We further demonstrated our commitment to growth through profitable acquisition this year as A&E
aggressively bid for a U.K.-based competitor in the industrial thread manufacturing business. While we
withdrew when the escalation of the bidding exceeded the level at which we believed the acquisition would
contribute to our overall return on invested capital, we will continue to look for other opportunities.A&E also
sought growth through geographic expansion. New worldwide economic realities continued to cause shifts in
where A&E’s customers manufacture apparel and where A&E needs to be located to support them.As a result,
we continued to strengthen our position in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, as well as focusing
greater resources on our expansion plans in Europe and Asia.
At A&E, in the first full year of operation for our consolidated customer support center, associates were
able to exploit the synergies of a team approach to filling all of our customers’ needs and enhancing overall
response time. Further modernization of chemical and dye dispensing allowed greater flexibility of dye lot
sizes and resulted in faster turnaround of production orders.The importance of offering a consistent product
to manufacturers of apparel, home furnishings and auto parts throughout the world is also paramount. A&E
color technicians use computerized electronic shade matching to ensure our customers that the color and qual-
ity of the thread they receive in their Mexican manufacturing facility is identical to that sent halfway around
the world to another plant.
A&E continued to expand productivity by further automating the manufacturing process, upgrading its
equipment and closing an underutilized North Carolina distribution facility. It also consolidated its U.S. dye-
ing and finishing facilities from three plants to two. A&E continued to improve the efficiency of its working
capital through the use of better inventory management techniques in order to satisfy customer needs for rapid
response and yet minimize carrying costs.