The reality of the day is that every business is as good as its distribution chains. There’s a case in point. The Monitor newspaper was always the best when it came to content compared to New Vision. Monitor obsessed about the product (the content of the newspaper). New Vision early on realized that it would never match this. It didn’t have the play field to beat Monitor at the content game.
Thus, New Vision turned its focus somewhere else. It focused on the distribution chain. That could have made all the difference. Assuming the two newspapers were going to Gulu, New Vision would always arrive at least three hours earlier than Daily Monitor. And that means New Vision broke the news. It was the early bird to this market. And there were places that Monitor couldn’t penetrate, Monitor was always in position to penetrate those places.
When you think of excellent distribution, you think of Coca Cola. Regardless of where one goes in this country, there’s a guarantee that one will find a cold Coca Cola. If you have a product or service, it’s important to think about its distribution chain. That’s both the forward and backward chain. The forward chain is how this product or service gets to the consumer. The backward chain is how the inputs to this product or service get to you.
There are three distinctions to be made, although often confused. It’s the one of logistics versus distribution versus supply chains.
Think of logistics as the art and science of materials management and distribution of these. Supply chain on the other hand is the aspect of the fusion of the suppliers plus the logistics plus the customers.
Logistics= Materials Management + Distribution
Supply chain = Supplies + Logistics + Customers
It thus becomes clear why a New Vision that focused on its logistics would end up over-taking Monitor that had only focused on the product. For in logistics, what’s important is adhering to the five rights, to have a product or service at the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity, and right quality at the right price. New Vision for many years focused on the logistics side of things. Because ultimately in the market, the person that wins the logistics battle will always win the market.
For many years, that was the advantage of Nile Breweries Limited (NBL) over Uganda Breweries Limited (UBL). Although UBL had the best marketing, probably the best products, it just couldn’t match NBL’s logistics capabilities. That has changed over time, but it’s the one thing that had given NBL the advantage. To over-turn this, UBL had to pay focus to its distribution chain.
This still explains why Café Javas chose to run its own food distribution chain instead of being at the mercy of Jumia Food or Glovo. It comes back to seeking the advantage through one’s logistics. It’s logistics that wins wars.