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For manufacturing businesses moving goods regularly between the UK and Europe, the cost of freight isn’t limited to the transport itself. Every shipment needs arranging and managing. Quotes need to be obtained, bookings made, paperwork checked and progress monitored. When plans change or something doesn’t go as expected, somebody has to deal with it. For busy purchasing and logistics teams, that can add up to a significant amount of time spent managing freight rather than supporting the wider operation.
A UK manufacturer of engineered components was moving several shipments each week between its production site in the UK, European suppliers and customers in Germany, France and the Benelux region.
The challenge wasn’t simply getting goods from collection to delivery. The customer wanted to reduce the amount of day-to-day administration involved in managing its European road freight. Its logistics team was dealing with several transport providers depending on the route and requirement. For individual movements, this could mean requesting and comparing rates, making bookings, sending shipment details, checking collection and delivery progress and contacting carriers when plans changed.
With different contacts managing different movements, the customer’s team was also spending time working out who to speak to when they needed an update or had an urgent requirement. None of these tasks was particularly complicated in isolation. The problem was their frequency. For a manufacturing business managing suppliers, production requirements and customer deadlines, the cumulative time spent administering transport was becoming a distraction from the team’s wider responsibilities.
Espace became the customer’s go to forwarder for European road freight. Instead of the customer’s team approaching different transport providers for individual movements, they could send their requirements directly to their Espace point of contact who knew the company and how they worked.
Espace would then arrange the appropriate vehicle, manage the booking and coordinate the movement through to delivery. For regular routes, agreed processes and requirements were kept on record, reducing the amount of information the customer needed to provide each time a shipment was booked, making booking much less time consuming.
Shipment updates were provided at agreed stages. Where UK-EU customs formalities were required, Espace’s in-house customs team could also support the movement, reducing the number of separate parties the customer needed to deal with. The customer still had visibility of its freight, but their team had a lot of time freed up with the support of Espace.
For more information on Taking the Admin Out of European Road Freight talk to Espace Global Freight