Lessening the load
Challenge
One of our customers was contracting an external business to manage their dedicated haulage services. This involved paying for a team of over 20 to arrange deliveries, communicate with hauliers, and manage pre-loading by our UK Paper Hub team – ready to be picked up and delivered.
The use of an external contractor required daily input from our team, as well as our customer’s teams. Our customer wanted to explore a more efficient solution by bringing the work back in-house at one of their European locations. We worked closely with them to ensure they were able to do this and, crucially, to help them generate time and ultimately costs savings.
Solution
First and foremost, we collaborated with our customer’s team to understand how we could help them achieve their goal of greater efficiencies and support the major change.
We invested in our own systems, so that our customer was able to bypass the contractor’s previously necessary third party platform, which then allowed our systems to communicate directly with one another.
And while it was not initially the plan, through a natural progression of working together on the project, we were able to help our customer unlock even greater value from our services by taking on the haulier relations and order management role for them.
Value
Updating our systems and taking on a new enhanced role saw our UK Paper Hub team work directly with our customer’s European office. This allowed them to significantly increase efficiency by removing the need to communicate with and pay for an external team of contractors – saving time, effort and costs.
Rather than our customer remotely coordinating haulage entirely in-house at their European location, our team was able to offer our established local knowledge to assist with the management of hauliers more effectively. And because we now manage these areas without external parties, our onsite team ensures a seamless supply chain – including pre-loading for just in time deliveries – backed by an updated system that allows a multi-haulier model which has extended our haulage network.
Having fewer parties involved has also reduced the chances of costly miscommunications. By liaising directly with hauliers and our customer’s team, we have been able to build stronger relationships and more insightful ways of working together that benefit everyone involved.
