Taking a leading role

The value of third party logistics is often underestimated but hear how Advanced Supply Chain and its operations director Kathryn Lewis has transformed the logistics and warehousing operation of Ultra Finishing when it went through a challenging period of growth, IT change, and facility consolidation and your doubts will surely disappear.

"We took over the Bolton operation in February 2014 and the client was, through no fault of their own, struggling. They had expanded very rapidly and their IT system simply didn't support the business. When we joined, the brief was to rapidly boost efficiency," explains Kathryn.

"I walked in on a Wednesday morning and never left. We did an immediate stock take and started the TUPE process."

It wasn't all plain sailing. Indeed, the staff did something of a double take to see a woman in charge. 

"Staff thought I was the PA when the Advanced team first arrived. I was the only female in the group. It took some of the guys weeks to admit that to me. I just found it hysterically funny!"

When Advanced moved in, it brought its own in-house developed WMS, which helped the operation shift up through the gears.

"As well as IT, and bringing our logistics experience, communication with the team was key," says Kathryn. "The management team also rolled up their sleeves when needed and joined in, leading by example. People went the extra mile, putting in extra hours."

It paid off. Before Advanced came on board, Ultra was hitting 50% of its Day 1 delivery target. That figure is now consistently above 95%.

Since then the challenges have kept coming. The client closed its Burnley facility, moving staff and operations to the Bolton warehouse or to the head office facility in Halifax. In addition, Ultra replaced its IT system with SAP in May 2015. Teething problems at the front end led to issues in the warehouse, which took a few weeks to get back up to speed.

The existing staff were nervous when Advanced came in. 

Kathryn says: "The good thing is how quickly the staff started to trust us, several of our team leaders are staff who were here then. We improved productivity by around 60% and reduced staff numbers required to do the volume. This was largely achieved as people left have gone for performance or behavioural issues."

The nitty gritty

Ultra Finishing is a varied business in many ways with production facilities in the UK and China. Much of its deliveries are old fashioned B2B to High Street retailers or large chains, but a growing amount is B2C deliveries driven by eCommerce. Furthermore, the product supplied varies enormously from taps to huge bathtubs.

"We have some lovely stuff in terms of big, awkward handling challenges," says Kathryn.

In terms of eCommerce, Ultra does not receive orders directly from end users, but orders are supplied via several of its bigger clients. Ultra uses the parcel carriers, such as DPD, DX, Royal Mail and Geodis, for eCommerce deliveries.

Kathryn says: "An order can be a parcel with taps in it, or a full pallet load. There is B2B and B2C, and B2B is not all the same. Within that, we have local High Street stores, who take a couple of pallets a week, or bigger customers, who receive two or three trailers a day from us to their warehouses."

A further challenge is that many of the pallets built contain mixed products. With often fragile ceramic products being ordered alongside hard metallic items, the dangers are clear.

"The products are very different in terms of shape and size, and so the issue becomes how to we pack them efficiently and securely on the pallet.

"We stream mixed pallet orders separately to a different team, who get used to this challenge. They learn what not to stack on top of something else."

The warehouse utilises a mix of wide and narrow aisles, with bulk storage and pick areas now segregated. The site uses a wide variety of MHE from LPG counterbalance trucks to pallet trucks with Carrylift the main supplier.

The weight of products drives the order process at Ultra.

"This is unique in my experience, weight is used to drive product into the correct stream. If it is over 100kg, we know it will be bulk and we will stream it to the pallet delivery side."

For companies that deal with bulky products only, they can more easily develop a sleek handling and delivery operation, but having a large mix of products going out in terms of size and weight can impact productive rates.

"This was probably one of our biggest lessons, we had expectations on rates because of the type of products, but the breadth has had the biggest impact on how we normally operate."

The fragile nature of the products means packaging is a key concern for Kathryn. 

"We are looking at different ways we can achieve this. We've got a heat tunnel shrink wrap machine that helps protect the corners of products.

"We are also trialling plastic air filled packages – we call them pillows. The bonus here is if a part of the pack bursts, the rest doesn't give. We can literally bounce products – not that we advocate that – and the product will get there in one piece."

Advanced brings the packaging in from the Far East with the Ultra products.

"It is cheaper to have it made in China and brought in," explains Kathryn. "We've got containers going out on a daily basis so we load some packaging in. We have to make sure we get the flow right so we don't to have an oversupply which may lead to a storage headache in the UK."

Kathryn is also pondering whether or not to mark parcels as fragile.

"Some people will handle fragile items more carefully, but others will assume they have been more thoroughly packaged and therefore be less careful."

Interestingly, Ultra does not accept returns from end users unless the item is faulty or damaged at point of arrival.

Kathryn says: "The products tend not to travel well, every time you put ceramics on a vehicle you risk damage plus you can't control how the end user packages items for return."

In terms of loading, the firm has one dock leveller, with the rest bay doors. With the A666 adjacent to the building, dust and film is an issue in the warehouse, which means Advanced runs a ride-on scrubber drier constantly on both shifts to ensure stock is kept clean. Further, Advanced has appointed a champion for every aisle to help keep them clean and tidy.

Forklift safety

As well as increasing efficiency, Kathryn was tasked with improving health & safety when she took over. 

"We have an ongoing action plan," she explains. "We have recognised people on the team who are leading on health & safety and we champion them. One focuses on forklift training specifically. We want safety to be a focus, not simply getting products out of the door.

The focus revolves around the forklifts as that is the biggest risk. Kathryn brought in an external assessor to look at each operator, regardless of experience, to make sure they were at the level they needed to be, and re-train them if necessary.

"There was a culture where people didn't want to report near misses, but we actively encourage this. A lot of sites neglect near misses and that's what we look closely at: why did it nearly happen? what can we do differently? 

"This is an initiative we have rolled out at all of Advanced's sites."

Accidental start

As with many leading lights the logistics industry, Kathryn got into the industry un-intentionally. She started with Business Express on what was initially a three week contract, carrying out data entry. This led to a job as supervisor in a returns centre and from there she worked her way up to director at Advanced Supply Chain.

Kathryn volunteers as a counsellor and is a qualified NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) trainer and has found these useful at work.

"Staff can be under very stressful situations, with home as well as work issues, and it is important to be sensitive to that."

"I've always been fascinated by how the mind works and interested in self-development. NLP gives you breathing space in difficult situations.

"Re-framing is a good technique to tackle staff who have mental block – whether it's warehouse safety or new processes – and helps you step back and find an answer."

As winner of the Leader of the Year award, we thought the best point to leave on was to ask what is leadership?

For Kathryn, leadership involves sending out a clear message to the team and being able to make difficult decisions.

"That said, it is crucial to empower staff to try things," she concludes. "People should have the confidence to try something and if it doesn't work, then learn from it. As long as staff are making decisions according to company values, they should be able to make those decisions without fear of being beaten up."