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Customer video: Coles Liquor

Jul 29, 2025 • 3 min

Coles Liquor is a 1,000-store omnichannel business operating across Australia as part of the Coles Group. Simon Atkinson, General Manager of Strategy and Transformation at Coles Liquor, shares how they transformed their supply chain operations through a strategic partnership with RELEX. The Coles team sought more than just a technology solution—they needed a partner capable of providing thought leadership for today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities. With RELEX, they not only found the best-fit application but also the strategic guidance essential for long-term success. 

Transcript 

So, my name is Simon Atkinson. I’m the general manager of strategy and transformation in the Coles Liquor business. Coles Liquor is a thousand-store omnichannel business that operates in Australia across all states and is part of the Coles Group. So, it sits adjacent to the supermarket business of Coles. 

So, when we went out to market and looked for partners to support liquor on its journey transforming the supply chain, we were really looking for two things. One, a partner who could provide thought leadership and advise us not just on the problems that we’re trying to solve today, but also about the problems of tomorrow. 

And RELEX definitely presented as a standout in terms of being able to provide that thought leadership into the liquor business. But, at a more basic level, the RELEX application was the best fit solution that we found in the market and has been a really great fit for our business in terms of the problems that we’ve had to solve and the configurations that we needed to make. 

So, the primary driver for the business case was working capital, and we’re really proud of the fact that we’re delivering and the transformation is delivering on those working capital objectives that were set when we got the investment to begin this program. But I do think more deeply, and the lasting benefit of this program goes far beyond that as an outcome. 

We’re definitely in a position now where we have a much stronger and a deeper alignment across the commercial teams, the supply chain teams, and the operation teams in terms of processes around range reviews, in terms of the trade plan, in terms of planogram compliance, and inventory, the basics of inventory management. And so it is a much – it’s a much more coordinated and inclusive way of managing the business than it was prior to the implementation of the system. 

The other area of major benefit that’s been for us that in the twelve months since we began the rollout, we’ve had floods, we’ve had major supply chain disruption, and we’ve had changes in our distribution centers. 

RELEX and the solution have put us in an incredible position to do disaster recovery planning, speak to the suppliers with confidence about shifts in demand, improve our scheduling and the flow through the distribution center, and manage labor efficiency within the warehouse as well. All of these things, which were known at the time that we put the benefit together, have become really strong proof points for the benefit that we’re seeing in the solution as it sits in the business today. 

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