DRIVING COMMUNICATION

Mike’s Monthly Message 61– January 2017

Core Objective 1 – Retention of staff

  • A warm welcome to all those who joined us since the last message. KamilIdczak who has joined us a Warehouse Assistant at Gatwick 2D and John Tobitt, introduced to ILG by Aldingbourne Trust, has joined us at Gatwick to work alongside Michael as caretaker, replacing Paulo who has moved to SP2.
  • We also welcome Peter Taylor as the new Warehouse Manager for Sterling Park 2 replacing John Kelly who has joined Gatwick as Warehouse Manager. We wish you both well.
  • On Monday 6 February we welcome our new Jimmy Choo warehouse team; Hirun Cryer, Kieran Lord (Apprentice), EmaClaudino (temp to perm through Best Connection) and Marianna Kovacs. These new employees will join Jane Deakin and Steve Rowley who are transferring from Gatwick. We wish you all the best for your training next week and every success with the new contract.
  • Best wishes to Alex North who has gone on maternity leave, we look forward to meeting the new arrival
  • Sadly we have some leavers to tell you about, Katie Gillman and Tom Wilson left us in January and in February Jacqui Buchan and Lee Hamilton will be leaving us too. We wish you all the very best for the future.
  • I am also sorry to have to advise you that Annette Collett has decided to take early retirement and leave ILG on Friday 3 February. Apologies for such short notice but I have spent the last few weeks trying to persuade Annette to stay as the new Receptionist at the Birches but to no avail. Annette has nearly 14 years’ service with ILG, the vast majority of that time being spent in the Finance team although she has also contributed to H&S and many other areas outside of this.She has seen some major changes over the years and has had to cope with a number of ups and downs in ILG’s fortunes, always with good grace and 100% commitment. I will personally miss her very much. I want to ensure that we give her a really good send off on Friday so we will be holding a presentation in the office at 4.00pm. Please can as many of you as possible be there.
  • Many congratulations to all those that have been nominated for SMOM in December. Dan Smith, Simon Alexander, Laura Stone, Tom Kirby, Ryan Ellis, Stacy Hancock, Mark Cooper and Liam Ingram
  • In third place isLaura Stone. Laura carried out a Certsure stock take over the 3 day Christmas period near enough single handed due to people phoning in sick. She has also been very proactive in coming in early to help with the backlog of orders.

‘I am voting for Laura because she gives 110% in everything she does and she always happy to help people round the warehouse. Laura will always go above and beyond and is a valuable member of the Certsure team and ILG as a whole. ‘

Well done Laura and I am pleased that an extra £50 will be in your pay this month. I have a feeling that we may be seeing your name again in this section in the future – Congratulations on such a great start to your career with ILG.

  • In second place is Simon Alexander. Despite being employed as a Business Development Manager Simon went to great lengths during December to help out the warehouse teams across our facilities.

‘Whichever warehouse I go to he seems to be there helping out. It is also true to say wherever he goes he instantly matches the work rate of anyone around him and warehouse managers love having him in there team. His positivity is just immense and I think he has been outstanding in December.’

Many thanks Simon – your hard work and commitment is much appreciated and I am pleased that you will receive an extra £100 this month.

  • And the winner this month is Dan Smith. He has worked tirelessly on the Self Portrait contract during their recent sale, working late, coming in early and really going that extra mile to be adaptive and ensure he did all he could to fulfil the customer expectations. He is a real team player and manages to remain professional in the toughest of situations.Not only this, he orchestrated the sale of redundant ARK stock making over £1000 for our charity of the year which will make a huge difference. Congratulations Dan, you will receive a very well deserved £250 extra this month.
  • On 21 and 23 February a representative from HSBC bank will be delivering seminars to ILG staff on financial management including saving for the future, debt advice and the perils of pay day lenders. Please make every effort to attend.

Having raised over £14,500 for our 2016 Charity of the Year we are adopting a new charity for 2017, Chailey Heritage based in Haywards Heath. This charity has been nominated in previous years and I am delighted that eventually they have been successful. Chailey Heritage are recognised as one of theUK’s leading centresfor children and young adults withneurological motorimpairment such as cerebral palsy.

Our first event will be ILG entering a team of 6 swimmers in a Swimathon on Good Friday - 14th April 2017 at the Dolphin Leisure Centre, Haywards Heath. Our allocated time is 11 am and we have 55 minutes for Team ILG to swim as many lengths as we can. We need 6 people for the team who take it in turns to swim 2 lengths as fast as they can. If you are interested in participating please can you contact Suzie Simms. If you would like to sponsor the team we have set up a team sponsorship page:

In this section I need to apologise for an oversight in the December message as I omitted to let you know the situation with the additional £50 bonus that we told you about in March 2016 which was dependent on us hitting our end of year forecast. Whilst we did hit our budget for the last financial year, as you know this was very tight with us only achieving 2.96% over forecast. Furthermore this forecast was downsized mid-year to take account of the additional costs of setting up unit 7, unit 25 and the Birches as we felt it unfair that monthly bonus for the remainder of 2016 should be negatively impacted by these costs. Given that the one off bonus was based on a higher target, prior to deciding what to do about the additional £50, I would like to get the audit finalised and look at our current position. The set up costs for The Birches are currently totaling 500K so I am sure that you appreciate the need to be prudent whilst also do our best to reward hard work.

  • In December we have got the year off to a very good start with very strong performance from our Fulfilment division in the run up to Christmas. This compensated for lower than anticipated Delivery business with many local businesses being closed over the Christmas period, although the Profile product is doing well.We relied on agency and casual labour to meet the increased warehouse volumes but with the controls we now have in place, and the tremendous efforts from staff from other departments, we managed to keep labour cost within our set parameters which all contributed to a very successful month.

Ask Me Anything

Just one question this month:

Hi Mike

Sorry to trouble. Just been looking at an email regarding the job vacancies for the new EG site and I get the impression applicants are a bit lacking. I personally when reading the advert and Job description would be put off applying if I was looking for a job.

Have you looked into another rota option and have you already considered and ruled out a straight 4 on 4 off 10 hrs a day with 1 hr lunch working rota . This kind of rota when operations require a 7 day week , I think works well and I would (If I was looking for a full time job) , get enough interest for me to at least apply .

This is really usefully stuff and very much appreciated. I have put this to Jane who is now calculating the cost elements of this system vs the one we were going to go with so this has been an excellent suggestion.

Thanks so much for thinking about this and taking the time out to share your thoughts, it was really helpful and I want you to know I am putting this forward as my vote for staff member of the month (no guarantee). It is exactly this type of thing that comes from the shop floor, makes us think, makes total sense and helps drives change Malcolm and I really appreciate it. Thanks again

  • Just to give you an update on the above question, we really like this option very much but working it into a rota for the Jimmy Choo contract at this stage, and keeping at least 3 staff on shift every day, was difficult. Once we have more information on order volumes,number of staff needed and are a few months into the contract we will give the option to the team to work through and, provided we can maintain cover this rota may be an option to cover a 7 day working week.

Core Objective 2: Retention and Growth of our Existing Clients

  • In the final month of 2016, it is fair to say we helped deliver thousands of items all over the world and previous records were smashed on all levels. Despite less number of working days in the month, this didn’t detract from the levels we were seeing, with customers seemingly ordering more and more products for Christmas. Whilst almost all customers experienced an upturn in volumes, some notable mentions include the following. Meli Melo had an increase of just over 10% in December, compared to November’s figures, which was already higher than normal. Steamer Trading, shipped around 25% more orders in December, which represents an additional 450 orders last month. Decks continues to grow month on month, and there was no change this time, with an additional 15% volumes or around 160 extra orders. Both Gifts and Hard Graft had noticeable differences in December. Gifts.Co.uk almost doubled their volume in November with an additional 700 orders and Hard Graft were responsible for an additional 400 + orders compared with previous. Finally as we move to the other warehouse, Charlotte Tilbury did around 10,000 extra orders compared to November, which was already a record month, so this is phenomenal growth.
  • In addition, this was all supported with growth from others too, including Self Portrait who more than doubled their numbers from November and Sophia Webster who had similar growth to report. A fantastic month to report all round, which saw ILG dispatch record numbers across all areas. Well done to all.
  • Lee Simmons will be moving in to a new role within ILG as Strategic Development Manager. Lee’s role will focus on the strategic direction and development of processes within the workplace, working in conjunction with a multitude of different departments to help deliver change, improve efficiency and adopt best practice. In conjunction with the introduction of Lee’s role, we have initiated Project Moonshotwhich encapsulates a number of key initiatives which we are looking to deliver this year. These projects are designed to maximise upon the systems we have in place, improve internal processes and ultimately make our customers more successful. Projects include:

RF picking and Scanning

 PO Receipt and Booking In

 Returns Management

 Replenishment

 Client Billing

 Wallboards

 Fusion enhancements

 Barcode Labels from .NET

Each time we deliver one of the projects listed above and conquer a planet I will update you in this message. Good luck on your travels Lee…

DRIVE

Throughout 2016 we, as a company, have raised 1797 breakdowns to be investigated. The below table highlights how many breakdowns have been successfully repaired and signed off and also, unfortunately, how many are yet to be approved or investigated. The total average days to repair is also reporting at 43 days, although there has been some significant improvement over the last couple of months the average of older issues has caused this average to come out so high with some logs taking over 200 days to repair. DRIVE sets out that investigations and repairs should be carried within 4 days of a breakdown being raised, this is also advised to our customers so they can feel confident that any issue raised will be looked in to. As you can see unfortunately we are not hitting this aim with only 21% repaired on time.

For 2017 we want to turn this around and ensure that both our staff and customers are receiving this commitment to fixing any problems or improving processes. DRIVE is a powerful tool giving you the opportunity to make your day to day that bit easier or ensuring excellent service is always at the forefront for our customers, we have seen the investment grow from you so we now want to provide a better service back . To do this we will be changing the way DRIVE is managed by having a dedicated DRIVE Mechanic and Head Mechanic to make sure these timelines are put in place. As part of our Management Development Programme our successful candidate, Alex Saunders, will now become our Process Improvement Manager and undertake this challenge of becoming the dedicated DRIVE Mechanic and Suzie Simms will become the Head Mechanic. As part of Alex’s role we will be able to help identify repeated breakdowns across the business and find the root cause, look to implement and challenge new processes to get the best out of our systems and push best practice throughout the business.

As you know we also record the categories as to why a breakdown occurred and, as reported each month, the categories we see repeatedly come out on top are our main focus for 2017. Training is easily becoming our most common root cause to most breakdowns happening throughout the business, which we will be addressing through DRIVE development, we cannot stress to you that training is the key to our success and is clear through DRIVE as shown below:

  • Our DRIVE roadshows are underway for each site which will give you an update on how DRIVE development will relate to pay review this year and also what else will be taken in to consideration. Every provisional licence task should be turned green for you to be considered for a review so use Evan’s Hub to get yourself trained and updated, these are core tasks for your area so for those of you that have been here a while you should easily complete these.
  • We are also now using a better screen recording and editing tool called Screencast. This is being utilised within the DRIVE development team with the aim to install this in Evan’s Hub so that mentors can have access to create and edit their own material.

CoreObjective 3: Growth through new business sales

Sales & Marketing

  • Look out for our new look website news page which will be featuring many more articles over the next year. The first of these is our Christmas statistics which should be live by the end of this week. Please read the article in full – it is interesting reading.
  • We have started 2017 with lots of activity. We have both FAB and Profile Campaigns under way with 160 wonderful FAB boxes being sent out already in January. We have since made contact with 135 of them already and have 7 accounts from whom we are awaiting more information to quote.

The Profile campaign is currently focusing on the Marine sector with initial interest being high and a number of meetings booked for this week. We have supported the F&B campaign with direct e-mails, bespoke videos and social media advertising such as the advert below.

  • 17 new starters are already committed for 2017! 4 in Delivery (All Profile) and 13 in Fulfilment.In addition to this, we have two new accounts within delivery to report, these being the Cedar Group who are printers and providers of packaging and they will be set up as a UK Mail and DHL Profile account and start on the 1st Feb and Salon Suppliers, who as the name suggests supply salons with product. These will be a UK Mail Profile account based in Southampton and will start Mid Feb.

Core Objective 4: Controlling our Costs

  • The new Baler at Sterling Park 2 has arrived. This will decrease the number of recycling collections that we have as well as increasing the numbers of bales we sell for recycling. Overall we estimate a saving of between £2,000-£3,000 as well as helping us achieve one of the aims of our environmental policy and keeping a tidy warehouse.

So, this message is already long enough so I will keep it brief. A great start to our new financial year, well done, thank you and I look forward to seeing you at the Annual Awards on Saturday.

Mike