Yahoo Finance Behind the brand: Opply, the automated ingredient ordering service for SMEs
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“If you think about the food industry, where would you find 1,000 kgs of matcha from?” says Helen Murphy, co-founder and CEO of UK-based Opply, billed as the world’s biggest and highest-quality supply chain platform.
Murphy’s question — Japan is the answer, the world’s ingredients second biggest market — is one of the reasons why she started her groundbreaking company in 2021. Opply is the world’s first automated ingredient ordering service for SMEs, which can source automatically for its customers and match, communicate and order from suppliers worldwide.
“There are all these mini directories or people who know each other in the industry,” says Murphy, “but there is no central source of data for the right raw ingredients — it doesn’t exist.
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“This is a massive global issue. No one knows where products ship, where they come from, how to contact supplies, what are the order quantities, is it sustainable. This is all a data issue.”
Murphy says that SME brands in the food and beverage industry form 90% of the businesses in consumer goods, as well as representing four trillion dollars of the raw ingredients spent worldwide. “And no one knows what they do. That’s crazy to us,” she adds.
A mechanical engineer by trade after graduating from Durham University, Murphy has been in consumer goods throughout her career following an initial travelling stint in Canada where she harboured dreams of becoming a baker. At US consumer goods giant Procter and Gamble, she then ended up leading the biggest ecommerce account for the company.
On the side, Murphy had started a business selling pet and baby food and accessories. She mulled taking the plunge full-time before costs from China tripled overnight and the margins crippled her business. “We always say I have a vendetta about supply chain with this,” jokes Murphy.
She then moved into consulting, specialised in supply chain and finance and soon realised that this was where companies, both small and large, were struggling.
It was when she joined the Entrepreneur First programme and met her co-founder Martin Postel that Opply's vision took shape. “He is regarded as one of the best in the world at practical AI, solving one of the biggest deep learning AI problems by making machines talk to each other.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also what makes the Opply platform tick, its technology instantly matching brands with the right suppliers and Murphy believing it has the most accurate data in the industry.
With its forecasting module, Opply can now predict future trends, how much its brands (which number over 100) should be ordering and selling; and saving its customers an average of two months in administration and up to 30% in costs.
“This is major for small brands,” says Murphy. “If you over-order that stock, or order too expensive cost of goods, it’s the number one reason for the killer of the margins.
“In our world, a lot of our brands think like consumers. They are so good at marketing and building brands and that’s how they’re so great at building, but often less supported on the operations side. We have a huge community and a private channel with them all. We never sell and we take our brands to pub quizzes and fireworks nights.”
Having formed a start-up herself, the British entrepreneur knows the challenges faced by SMEs when it comes to supply chain issues. “I was one of these brands once,” she adds. “So we aren’t in it to get a quick deal, we know that their sales will be higher and costs lower.
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“We are trying to do something that we think will genuinely change our industry.
"We aren’t just building another model in the background. If we can predict the movement, the pricing, the trends of food and beverage worldwide, that is what our global markets sit on.”
Behind the brand: CEO Helen Murphy on…
Team problem solving
“I’m all about attention to detail and very big picture. At Opply we run a programme with our team called StrengthsFinders. I believe everyone in the world is the best at something and you just have to find what it is. I’ve got a friend who is amazing at detangling Christmas lights. I said she should do something with her hands through her dexterity. She’s in HR and she is the best at that.
"At Opply, we buddy people in the company based on opposing skills. We ask them to come up with their biggest problem of the week and sit with their buddy and solve it with them. And that produces the best results.”
Building a process-driven team
“Our company motto is ‘challenge kindly’. I believe you have to challenge yourself and be curious about everything. That’s the only way you keep learning. I think we’ve lost that through social media, where we are fed information and don’t properly challenge it. In our interview process we question and test on empathy. We shouldn’t knock people down.
"I got one of the best pieces of advice early in my career from a mentor, Sambit Nayak, who was my first ever finance manager at P&G. He said: ‘It’s about the process not about the people.’ He’s right.”
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