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Yorkshire p ide

12th January 1995
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Page 32, 12th January 1995 — Yorkshire p ide
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Ripponden and District Motors used to be in the bus business. Then passengers started using Ripponden's PSVs to send parcels and 60 years later Ripponden Carriers is a major player in the nextday parcels sector. It has thrived by combining innovation with tradition.

Motorists who catch the haunting strains of Men of Harlech or Abide With Me as they drive past Ripponden Carriers' West Yorkshire base aren't imagining things. The United Carriers subsidiary has a brass band rehearsal room on its premises, and the players get together once or twice a week.

The band is based in Ripponden village and the express parcels carrier felt sponsoring it would be good for community relations. "We'll give the Black Dyke Mills Band a run for their money in 1995," chuckles Ripponden Carriers director Geoff Greenman, who has 25 years with the company Known until recently as Ripponden Motors, Ripponden Carriers is an unusual blend of traditional values and modern technology. From the outside its base, which straddles Oldham Road, looks like it hasn't changed for 60 years.

If John Hirst, managing director in the thirties, were to walk into the 5,620m2 warehouse today, all he'd really remark on is the way it has been extended over the past six decades. The parcels sorting deck with its old-fashioned trolleys, and the quaint-looking little office, look almost as if they've been caught in a time warp.

Almost, but not quite.

Closer inspection reveals winking computer screens, and a bangup-to-date system of barcoding packages to aid tracking. And while the livery of the trucks has changed very little over the years it's only recently been altered to reflect ownership by United—Leyland Daf 45 Series and Renault Midliners have long supplanted the Bedfords and REOs that John Hirst ran.

The company name is still painted on to the vehicles, though --stuck-on decals would seem inappropriate somehow—and Ripponden Carriers still has comprehensive bodybuilding and paint shops.

It only stopped building its own bodies, complete with wooden floors and frames, five years ago. "We've still got a felled ash tree maturing if you happen to know a cabinet maker who wants it," smiles traffic office manager, John Cannon.

Wide slatted

The workshops now concentrate on refurbishing the fleet's bodies; it is steadily replacing the old-style rear tailboards and narrow-slatted shutters with full-length wideslatted shutters.

Its time-served craftsmen clearly knew a thing or two: some of the bodies they turned out have lasted more than 20 years, outlasting several chassis.

Ripponden Carriers is living proof that a parcels carrier serving a limited geographical area, albeit one that has gradually expanded over the past five years, can survive and prosper by providing a dependable service at competitive rates. Its 200 employees service Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Humberside; they are working towards I3S5750 accreditation.

United Carriers is wise enough to recognise the company's strengths, and does not attempt to dictate day-to-day policy from a distant head office."Obviously we're set annual budgets but we're totally autonomous within the group," says Greenman. "We don't get traffic from them, but we do give them some traffic from our territory for distribution outside the North. The past few years haven't been easy, and rates haven't got any better, but we managed to combat the recession with tight controls on costs and an aggressive sales campaign. We've just had our best year for sales in the history of the company so that tells you something. And we expect some modest growth in 1995."

Greenman's next step will be to promote what Ripponden Carriers has to offer to companies based elsewhere in England who want to deliver goods to northern customers. A firm in Andover already trunks products up to Ripponden for onward distribution twice a week. "We're looking to send salesmen out of the area," he says, "and we're especially interested in attracting business from the West Midlands and counties such as Northamptonshire."

Greenman points out that the firm's depot is ideally placed to cover the North. It's close to the M62, 25 miles from Leeds, and the same distance from Manchester.

Some 90% of all consignments are delivered within 24 hours, and a guaranteed next-day delivery service is available. Average drop size is 60-70kg but heavier items, sometimes palletised, are accepted, as are full loads. Typical consignments include textiles, wallpaper, and computer stationery.

We only take business that fits our existing mix," says Greenman. "We look for clean, boxed traffic, and we reckon we've got more collection vehicles in the North than anybody else." He reckons that his greatest rivals are own-account operators but over the past couple of years he's managed to persuade a considerable number of them to cease using their own vehicles, and switch to Ripponden.

"They've decided to stick to their core activities instead," he says. "We compete with everybody from the big multinational parcels people to the owner-driver with a van. Of course the advent of next-day services was a wonderful thing for us because we've always done it."

That's no idle boast. According to Commercial Motor's archives, in the autumn of 1934, Ripponden and District Motors was delivering daily to such far-flung places as Ashton-under-Lyne and Hull. "The system is such that consignments collected up to the evening of one day are delivered next morning anywhere in the large area of operation," CM reported. "We've got big accounts that have been with us for 50 years," Greenman says.

Most of the 90 blue-andcream trucks in the Ripponden fleet are 10tanners, with a sprinkling of 12, 13 and 17-tonners. "We run some Iveco Ford Cargo 7.5-tonners as well, but they're near the end of their time with us, and they won't be replaced," he says. "There have been too many instances when the payload they offer was inadequate for our purposes. We can get five tonnes on the 10-tonnersour bodies are a bit heavier than standard bodies." The fleet also includes nine drawbars and five artics.

Cost effective

Vehicles stay in service for an average of seven years, covering some 40,000km a year; sometimes considerably more. Maintenance is handled in-house. Greenman is currently introducing a computerised whole-life vehicle costings system to see if this policy is truly cost-effective.

Computerisation has had a major impact on the firm in the seven years since the Hirst family sold the business, and it was the accounts department that benefited first. The first computerised monthly invoices that went out arrived before the manually prepared ones were raised for the previous month.

This shook some customers, "but we brought our cashflow forward by 14 days", says Greenman.

Ripponden Carriers began in 1921 as a bus and coach operator, moving into goods haulage in 1931. "People started putting parcels on the buses to go to Oldham market, and it started from there," he explains. The buses were sold to Halifax Corporation before the war, but Ripponden continued to run coaches, until the late fifties.

Until 1974 the company also held a snowclearing contract with the local authority, but local government reorganisation put paid to that. It still has its snowploughs, however—a late sixties Albion and a venerable Guy. They're in full working order and are sometimes used to clear a path to the M62 in the winter months if the council doesn't act fast enough_ The ploughs are stored alongside a restored Albion and a 1947 Fordson, both in Ripponden colours. John Cannon still takes the little Fordson for the occasional run.

Cannon started with the company as a van boy more than 30 years ago; he well remembers what it was like when it was owned by the Hirsts. Their's was a benign regime by all accounts, although some of their views might seem a little strange to modern hauliers. "They didn't approve of power steering because they felt it made the drivers soft, and had it disconnected when it started to be fitted to trucks as standard," Cannon recalls. "They didn't approve of radios either because they reckoned it distracted the drivers. To save money they didn't put antifreeze in the lorries. After all, they were kept in a heated warehouse overnight and ran at working temperature during the day" But what about weekends, when the heating was switched off? "As the trucks came in on a Friday evening we drained the water out and refilled the radiators on a Monday morning," Cannon explains. That was an old-fashioned approach even then, but it saved cash, and would now be applauded as environmentally friendly

Greenman stresses that Ripponden Carriers has its roots in the North, and that's the way it will stay. There's room for a little expansion outside its current catchment area, but a major extension of its boundaries would require outbased drivers, or even another depot. That's not on the cards, says Greenham; Ripponden realised long ago that with just one depot you can keep very tight control of what goes on.

"There's continuity here," he reflects. "The staff don't change much, and so customers know that next year they're likely to be dealing with the same guy they're dealing with today. They build up a relationship. "We have a personalised aftersales service—and with all due respect to the big boys, you can't offer that with a 30-depot network."

PI by Steve Banner


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