Transport Management

Transport is a significant cost to business that requires specific skills to manage.  But it is a mistake to focus on transport cost to the exclusion of wider supply chain cost and opportunities to drive competitive advantage. 

Companies face three inter-related transport tradeoffs; outsourced Vs in-house, modal options, and cost Vs service.  We help clients find and maintain the optimum balance between the competing factors by exploiting our consultants’ real-world and consulting experience of transport management, working at operational, tactical and strategic levels. 

Capacity Management

A key measure for any distribution operation is utilisation of assets, with the trade-off against this being the service level offered to the customer. Capacity management helps to set and maintain this strategic balance.

We have helped clients to plan the distribution assets required, schedule vehicles and staff, and devise operational strategies to cope with seasonality and growth as part of maintaining the right distribution capacity at an appropriate cost.

Routing & Scheduling

This involves the management of vehicles and staff on a tactical basis to balance running cost with service demands. The frequency of scheduling can vary from once a month up to many times a day, depending on the industry. Numerous software and tracking systems exist to carry out this task.

We do not offer any routing or scheduling software, but we help businesses to optimise the use of their existing packages. We also design and implement the service level agreements and key performance indicators that are required as design parameters for the scheduling systems.

Home Delivery

Business to consumer trading looks attractive, but the home delivery channel has a very different nature to the regular business to business channel. Because it interfaces with the ultimate consumer, it generates many more queries, complaints, missed deliveries and returns, which create an explosion in internal communications. The home delivery channel needs to have a completely different set of processes and management compared to business to business.

We help clients to design their customer offering, and then implement the supporting processes for warehousing, delivery & call centres. We also support the selection process to find the appropriate logistics partners.