DRIVING COMMUNICATION

Mike’s Monthly Message 74– February 2018

Core Objective 1 – Retention of staff

We have welcomed the following new members of staff this month:

  • Samuel Haggar – Junior Data Analyst at Burgess Hill
  • Shane Drayton – Warehouse Assistant at East Grinstead Unit 25
  • Liam Mordue – Customer Service Account Executive at East Grinstead
  • Aaron Pearce – Warehouse Assistant at East Grinstead
  • David Robinson - Apprentice Warehouse Assistant at East Grinstead
  • William Smart – Warehouse Assistant at East Grinstead Unit 25
  • Courtney Smith – Apprentice Warehouse Assistant at East Grinstead Unit 25
  • Richard Squires – Warehouse Assistant at Burgess Hill

If I have not met you already, I look forward to meeting you soon and wish you all a long and rewarding career at ILG.

Sadly we have had two leavers this month, Hannah Laird and Jessica Liddy from East Grinstead. Next month Luke Hussey and Kamil Idczak from Gatwick Gate will also be leaving us. We wish you all the best in the future.

SMOM

For SMOM we have combined December and January’s votes. In total we received 29 votes and 16 nominees that included: Rob Saunders, Tom Sumpter, Hannah Chaffe, Jake Styles, Daniel Roffey, Sarah Mitchell-Voice, Sarah Woodbridge, Rebecca Smith, Kina Angelova, Kieran Hawton, Sarah McMillian, Sam Westwick, Mark Cooper, Emma Brander, Helen Everest and Chloe Sayers.

  • In third place receiving £50 is Hannah Chaffe based at Gatwick warehouse.

Hannah was nominated for her commitment, enthusiasm and proactive approach to her job. This was highlighted when Hannah used her initiative to pull together a short piece of training on the risks of using incorrect pallets to go on the Goods In training matrix. Not only that but Hannah consistently works hard to support others in the team and ensures everyone is working safely. This is what two of her colleagues said:

“Hannah really does embrace her role as an H&S Rep and I am continually impressed with her input to the meetings – she really is a role model for the most recently appointed H&S Reps.”

“I would like to nominate Hannah Chaffe as the staff member of the month because of being enthusiastic and passionate about her job. Whenever I need help she is always there to help me. I am happy to work in a team where she works.”

Well done, Hannah.

  • In second place receiving £100 is Sarah McMillianbased at East Grinstead, fulfillment customer service.

Sarah was nominated for her high level of customer service and going above her call of duty.An example of this is when Sarah took a phone call from a Charlotte Tilbury customer who was worried about receiving her orderwhich was a present for someone. This was being delivered on one of our ILG vans and Sarah went above and beyond to find out what was happening and constantly relayed information back to the customer. The customer has said that it was the best experience of customer service they has ever received:

“The customer has said that this was by far the best experience of Customer Service ever received and wanted to personally say thank you for the effort Sarah went to in confirming where the delivery was. I am delighted that this customer took the time to make the call and even more thrilled that Sarah’s work has been recognised.”

Excellent work, Sarah.

  • And in first place receiving £250 is Jake Stylesbased at East Grinstead warehouse.

Jake was nominated for his ‘above and beyond approach’ to ensure thatthe Buster and Punch account run smoothly, stopping at nothing to make surehis contract and his team run like clockwork. He has been at the very heart of a big turnaround on service and stock for this client. Outbound service was not bad from ILG perspective but due to a major IT glitch at their end they had lost complete track of stock, returns was poor from an ILG perspective and my opinion, is he has been at the forefront of the stock take, working with B&P to get stock 100% bar coded and clearing up returns and has gone far beyond what we expect of a new warehouse person. Nothing is too much trouble for this very humble young man. This is what a few of his colleagues aid about him:

“Jake will always tackle problems head on, he will come early, stay late and do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. Jake is also a joy to have in the team, his happiness is contagious, his humour can brighten the darkest of days and he can always, always, lift your mood.”

“Jake is a master on this account, his knowledge on the products is superb and he takes great pride in the work he does. You can see that Jake has a passion for the account and this shows on a daily basis.”

“His help and organisation during this re-work has been massive, showing ILG in a great light to the customer daily. He is always happy to help and a big asset to the team.”

Congratulations, Jake.

ILG Annual Awards for Excellence

ILG employees enjoyed a glittering awards ceremony, dinner and party on Saturday 10 February at the Crowne Plaza, Felbridge where we celebrated all that we have achieved in the last year. During the course of the evening awards were presented to the winners of the 2017 ILG Awards for Excellence. They are:

• Award for Innovation and Improvement – Daniel Roffey, Warehouse Trainer

• Award for Customer Focus – Rebecca Smith, Delivery Customer Service Representative

• Team of the Year – Trend, Gatwick

• Manager of the Year – John Kelly, Gatwick Warehouse Manager

• Grant Ashley Award for CSR – Dan Sawyer, Team Leader

• Employee of the Year - Kyle Wakeford, Warehouse Assistant and Jack Fountain, Warehouse Assistant

Many congratulations to all those that were finalists for an award and a huge well done to the winners.

  • As you know we are supporting Crawley Open House as our charity of the year in 2018. They have a sponsored sleep out on April 12th which is meant to help raise awareness of how tough it is for homeless people whilst of course raising sponsorship for the House. Tom Ashley, John Kelly, Dan Burgess, Billy Ross & Kieran Lord will be taking up the challenge. So, let’s help raise some money!

The charity also has one or two places remaining in our Run Gatwick half marathon team. This takes place on Sunday 13 May 2018 and the runners getting a free place, with a commitment to raise sponsorship in excess of £500 for Crawley Open House. More details of the event are at

If you are interested in running please contact Jane Middlemiss.

In the meantime we have been collecting donations of dog food/treats/leads/collars/toys. Many users of the centre have their own dogs which offer a degree of security and companionship to the homeless. The centre tries to look after these dogs as well as their owners and so if you would like to make a donation please pass that to a member of the social committee or a member of HR and we will arrange to pack our donations up and deliver.

For more information about Crawley Open House visit

Bonus


Core Objective 2: Retention and Growth of our Existing Clients

Project Moonshot

  • Another month flies by and we are well under way with further development on the Moonshot project. We are continuing to move accounts across to PDA picking and the new PO receipting procedure. Over the course of March we are going to focus our attention on the Gatwick site and introduce this technology to some of those contracts. During March we are looking to involve the IT geniuses at each site with extra training for the PDAs and some of the new initiatives, which will help us have more skilled people across the sites to provide support. They will be able to help with queries, updates and general day to day usage.

Finally, we have also set the objectives and agreed the immediate goals we are working on over the course of 2018, to bring further changes to the operation. We have identified improvements to the PDA picking routine, adding extra detail to the PO receipt, perpetual inventory management, and setting up automatic weight reconciliation to name just a few. These changes have been approved and over the next couple of weeks will start development. All of this accompanied by the introduction of Metafour, is set to greatly improve the speed of picking and shipping in operations.

DRIVE

  • Firstly, a huge thank you to everyone who has taken time out of their day to utilise DRIVE this month. Unfortunately it has been a fairly quiet month, with just 245 logs raised across the business; under half the amount raised for January. It would be really good to get these figures back up as we continue to look at ways to improve as a business.


Burgess Hill have retained their title of DRIVE logs raised with an impressive 78. This was closely followed by Customer Services with 64. Once again it has been great to see DRIVE used across so many sites and departments.

There have been some really fantastic logs this month, and we are once again starting to see an increase in breakdowns not relating to customer errors. We reported last month that well over half of the logs raised across the business related to customer offences, but this has been drastically reduced this month to just 24% of the total breakdowns. Once again, here are the golden rules we should be asking before logging a breakdown.

  • Has it caused customer offence?
  • Could it potentially cause customer offence?
  • Has it prevented me from doing my job correctly?
  • Is there a better way of doing this?

Unfortunately, due to a reduced number of logs this month it has not been possible to pick a winner for the best breakdown. Please remember, there is a £75 prize up for grabs for whoever raises the best log that has the potential to help improve our customers, or our own service.

Delivery CRM

  • February has been a month of consolidation as we have bedded in the new starters from January. We have also seen the start of a number of new accounts Café Racer, V W Heritage and Express Exports. The Capital Hair and Beauty shipments went well through their big sale in February and we will be meeting with them at the end of this month to discuss delivery performance with us looking to win back all the business. February has also been the month were we can measure the impact of the tariff increases from the 1st January. There have been a number of customers questioning the increases but the good news is that they have come to us to discuss so we can show them that the impact on their spend is actually quite small. We do have one loss to report which is Wildcat Taconic. However they are willing to talk to us and we are trying to win the business back.

Netcourier has made a big change to the way we monitor deliveries in the delivery department and in March we will be using the back of house function Datasense to report true delivery performances to our customers. Datasense reports true data in seconds which means we can increase the number of review meetings we can attend and now can show our customers what they want to see at a click of a button. We will report back next month on our customer feedback.

Fulfilment CRM Update

  • In fulfilment we welcome back BootTree to our Gatwick warehouse. This is coming back to ILG with the “Blundstone” range only and we will be holding less stock as we will be receiving weekly replenishments from Limpio rather than the container deliveries from supplier. We are also in the final stages of implementation for Sophie Hulme is a luxury leather handbag and accessories company. This account will be coming to the Birches and we will be dispatch both the wholesale and ecommerce orders for this customer.
  • Throughout February we have continued to target customers for review as we seek further commitment and long term partnerships with our customers. Notable customers we have met with include Study Group, Trend, Buster & Punch, Commodity & This Works. After ongoing discussions we have secured a two year contract with Form Nutrition which is great news as this customer is growing steadily. We now focus our attention on further contracts such as The Nue Co, Jaded, Turun, Hard Graft, Olivier Baby & Bordelle to add to our portfolio. Sadly we have said goodbye to Sophia Webster having traded with ILG for a number of years. We experienced an immense growth period with Sophia Webster, so much so we had to relocate them a number of times to keep up with the growth of the brand during their time with ILG. Due to this exit of this account we are planning on moving the Meli Melo contract to the Under Croft at East Grinstead in order to enhance the offering we can provide to this customer.

February has seen a busy month in Customer Services with the introduction of customers such as Olivia Burton, Little Green RadicalsDemellier. The plan in March is to have a real push on training. We will soon be taking on further new accounts so it is vital we put the work in now.

We continue to receive various rate increases from carriers and notably in February we have received an increase from Cranleigh Freight. We will now be reviewing our options when shipping pallets as we look to contribute towards effective cost savings whilst keeping this efficient.

Netcourier update

  • We are now in the final stages of testing the Fulfilment booking API with Exact and Metafour. Successful bookings have been made with all major carriers from 3EX.Net so we are looking at testing the special instructions and specific routing requests to make sure the transition from 3EX.NET to Netcourier runs smoothly. We are keen to get this new booking process operational as soon as possible and a roll out plan will be communicated to all warehouse managers in the coming weeks, we will ideally convert one warehouse at a time to provide focused onsite support and by end of Q2 have all sites fully running via this API platform.Once dates are finalised for the roll out plan training for the Fulfilment Customer Service team will be announced.

Another key objective we have been working on is the roll out of third party bookings within Netcourier. Currently these are still being booked through 3EX.NET causing our customers to receive two different invoices and also involved a lot of admin time to process, within the Netcourier system this will allow our clients to book their imports/3rd party collection requests online themselves and also book the carrier collection part directly on to the suppliers software. This again has taken a lot of set up to achieve and is currently under testing, we will conduct some test shipments with the Delivery Customer Service team before a full launch however this will add another huge plus and give our Support team more time to help look after our customers more effectively.

One exciting new feature to come early in Q2 will be the release of “Quickship”, Netcouriers new software that will allow order processing to work alongside the likes of Magento, Shopify and other clients own software packages. The concept of this software is to retrieve a file output of a processed shipment and convert this in to a live booking in Netcourier and present the customer a shipping label to place on their parcel (a lot like how 3EX.NET works now). This piece of software will open many more new sales opportunities and help convert some of our current customers who haven’t been able to move across to Netcourier due to current IT constraints.

Metafours reporting tool, Datasense, is to start being utilised within our CRM programme to help provide visual representation of our service stats and performance. It collates data at a click of a button and displays it in easy to read charts with a number of different options to help compare year on year or week by week stats. This will only be in use for Delivery clients until the Fulfilment bookings start to migrate across however please see a preview of some of the graphs we can produce using this tool: