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Leading Scale

BME’s clear and focused strategy is aimed at adding scale

Our scale and leading market positions make us a natural consolidator in our fragmented markets. Having significant scale allows us to operate and distribute our products to our customers more efficiently and more sustainably. This gives us more room to invest in our business. By leveraging our continuously increasing scale, we can further expand our value-added service proposition, ensuring a very close proximity to our customer with their specific needs.

To support our strategy, we have defined a concise plan – ‘Together We Build’ – to deliver operational and commercial excellence across the Group’s operating businesses. This plan is underpinned by ‘six pillars’ and supported by ‘three enablers’.

By establishing and investing into our functional capabilities on both Group and Operating Company level, we can leverage these across the Group’s operating businesses and which form the foundation for further growth and margin improvement.

Our strategy delivers value for all our stakeholders: our customers, our suppliers, our people and our shareholders.

Our six pillars

  • Commercial Excellence

    Commercial Excellence initiatives aim to design and deliver commercial best practices that maximize profitable revenue and enhance our competitive advantage. These initiatives are mainly relating to Pricing, Sales Force Effectiveness, Assortment Harmonization and Private Label development.

  • Procurement

    Procurement initiatives optimize cost-effective sourcing of product and non-product related spend across our Operating Companies by leveraging the scale of our Group. 

  • Supply Chain

    Supply Chain initiatives enable cost-effective delivery, reducing inventory levels and developing service delivery centric business opportunities. These initiatives mainly relate to the optimization of our (central) warehousing, transportation/fleet and inventory. 

  • Format, Footprint and Real Estate

    Format, Footprint and Real Estate initiatives focus on optimizing our existing branch network, opening of new greenfield branches, innovating on formats adapted to changing customer needs and lastly, on optimizing our real estate portfolio.

  • Organisational Efficiency

    Organizational Efficiency initiatives aim to streamline the organization and its processes while increasing the capabilities of our Operating Companies to deliver products and services efficiently. These initiatives mainly relate to optimizing our back-office processes.

  • Focused Growth

    Focused Growth represents our ambition to make targeted acquisitions to complement and strengthen our market position and businesses across our key geographies.

Our three enablers

  • Finance

    Finance supports our Operating Companies and Functional pillars in delivering our strategic goals with up to market standard reporting, management information & forecasting and support on tax, treasury, legal and internal audit, whilst maintaining compliance.

  • People

    People initiatives aim to build a high performing organisation while delivering the best experience for our customers, suppliers and people. Together we develop and acquire the best-in-class employees to accelerate and drive performance. We strive to offer our employees a great and safe place to work where they can grow and work with passion.

  • Digital & IT

    Digital & IT initiatives leverage state of the art technology to help our Operating Companies to deliver products and services efficiently and to improve our customer and supplier experience. We do this for example by further harmonising and modernising our ERP systems, as well as by offering our customers a continuously enhanced digital experience and solutions like our eCommerce platform.