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International,integrated—yet
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giving personal service
ember companies of a El 5m public group work together to serve widely
trying customers in the UK and Europe by lain Sherriff 4E NAME BULLENS is well 'own on the UK removal scene but ice the late Forties Bullens has been lidding an international reputation an expert in exhibition organizain which supplies furniture, wareRising and packaging for shows .ywhere in Europe.
One of Bullens' international tivities is to pack, store and entually transport the personal fects of United States company ecutives based in Europe. Every pect of the movement is handled by aliens. In addition to the physical le, it looks after the documents for ipping, import, Customs clearance Ld insurance. From its experience this very specialized field iltspur International Freight Ltd has tilt a highly successful international Lulage business.
The group to which Bullens and IF belong is Giltspur Ltd, a £15.2m public company which had a turnover of £35m last year and which has four sub-holding companies and more than 60 operating companies. These cover a wide range of activities —among them vehicle repair, bodybuilding, freight forwarding, warehousing, removals, and domestic and international transport.
The transport activities of this massive empire are controlled by the six-man board of Giltspur International Freight Ltd. Under its chairman, Mr T. E. D. Harker, GIF has a packaging company, an air freight company, a domestic haulage and removal company and an international freight company. GIF's turnover last year was £1.2m and its pretax profit totalled £930,000.
Channelflow Freight Services Ltd, a Bullens Freight subsidiary, alone has 97 trailers operating constantly on international haulage. Channel flow, however, has no tractive units. This trailer-only company uses the services of other group subsidiaries for haulage and is constantly moving upwards of 1,500 tons of traffic around Europe daily. Channelflow does not to my mind properly describe the activities of the company. I first visualized Channelflow as a shipping and forwarding company which shunted trailers back and forth across the English Channel. In fact, the short Channel run is the smallest part of Channelflow's operations. With its head office at King George Dock, Hull, and other offices at the main East Coast ports it comes as no surprise that the initial business of this company was to Scandinavia, and this remains the major part of its traffic today. Other East Coast traffic is programmed through Leith, Grangemouth, Immingham, Felixstowe and Tilbury, with inland bases at Hinckley, Leicestershire; Rutherglen, Lanarkshire; and Manchester. Because of the additional Irish traffic, two other bases are located at Liverpool and Bristol, Nevertheless, the main interest is in Scandinavia and northern Europe. The only non-UK office is at Rosenburg in the Netherlands where the company trades at Channelflow By.
Channelflow's first international activities were with Scandinavia sending unaccompanied unit-load traffic. The traffic is still mainly unitload but over the past 20 years the field of activity has grown as has the demand for an accompanied service.
97 pc fully laden
Gradually, traffic operations have spread into Germany, Italy and France. First of all it was to meet the requirements of related Giltspur companies but, to ensure balanced loads, other customers had to be sought. Now Channelflow claims a 97 per cent fully laden traffic flow on international traffic. This is the figure that is normally sought by the company although where new areas are being developed an imbalance must he expected but not for long accepted.
The most recent areas of development are Hungary and Kuwait but expansion both here and into other parts of the Middle East will be controlled to ensure that imbalance does not become uneconomic.
To all of its operational areas Channelflow provides a completely integrated transport service all through its own resources or those of other Giltspur companies. Manufacturers or exporters can have goods collected at the factory, packed, documented, containerized and transported to any part of Europe with all duties, fees and charges paid, unpacked and installed in a customer's premises, two, three or four thousand miles distant by making one telephone call in the UK to set the process in motion.
For example, the world's largest paper-making machine is being built in Britain today by Walmsleys (Bury) Ltd, and within 18 months it will be producing multi-strata paper and board 365 inches wide at the rate of 3,000ft a minute at Obbola, a small Swedish offshore island.
In all the machine will weigh 6,500 tons and it is valued at more than E5m. Channelflow is moving it in parts weighing between Icwt and 50 tons. Its Swedish agent, Wilson & Co AB, is controlling the discharging operation.
The advantage to both Walmsleys and the Obbola Linerboard company are that they require only to manufacture or install the equipment; every other detail is handled by the UK haulier. Indeed, if a small light part is required urgently, Channelflow is able to pass it to another related company, Channelflow Air Freight Ltd, without any inconvenience to the customer and with the least possible trouble to itself. Another contract demanding pac ing and transport expertise of t highest order is one which occupi three accompanied trailers a week o of Yeovil, Somerset, to Marseilles South France. It involves an Angl French helicopter project. T contract involves the construction Lynx, Puma and Gazelle helicopte by the Westland Helicopters Ltd al Aerospatiale of France and is wor £90,000 per annum to Channelflo. Obviously, it is being handled to t: satisfaction of all concerned—it h been running since July 1972, so th by the end of the second year, Channelflow had grossed £180,000.
The York semi-trailers on the run are hauled by Volvo F88 tractive units. Channelflow traction for its 95 tilt trailers is supplied by Hewson Bros (Howden) Ltd which operates 97 tractive units on both general and refrigerated traffic. The management team at Howden is small. Mr P. Everingham is director and general manager. Mr B. Nalton is in charge of refrigerated traffic and the general haulage operations come under Mr B. Whitelam.
At the Hull office of Hewson, Mr J. Creaser is in charge of operations. Regular traffics are consigned out of Immingham to Rotterdam, Gothenburg and Copenhagen and Oslo.
Hewson acts as both collection and delivery operator to Channelflow and as long-haul contractor. When Hewson does not accompany the traffic in Europe it is organize& by the Europort office of Channelflow using the Dutch operator Van Twist. But the rate which Channelflow quotes to its customer includes the haulage at both ends of the sea voyage.
Channelflow provides three types of services. Unit-load traffic to Sweden, Finland, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Kuwait, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Hungary and the whole of Ireland. Its UK groupage services are operated from its terminals in the West Country, London, Midlands, Humberside, Lanes and Scotland to Gothenburg, Boras, Malmo, Halsingborg, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Oslo, Helsinki, Vienna, Salzburg, Basle, Zurich, Hungary and Kuwait, and express carriage services are also provided to these countries.
For a company so actively involved in international freight I was surprised to learn that its many activities did not include inland Customs clearance which it says it receives from established ICDs where both the standard and costs are satisfactory. I suspect that if ever Giltspur found either a deterioration in service or an unwarranted rise in costs it would set up its own Customs clearance organization—it has both the financial resources and management expertise to make a success of it.
Operating quite separately from Channelflow and Hewson is Bullens Transport Services Ltd, which is also part of the International Freight Group but is mainly involved in removals and includes in its operating companies 20th Century Transport Ltd and American Overseas Shipping Ltd. The close association of all of these companies provides Channelflow with a national network of collection and delivery points, warehousing, packaging and, of course, a contact with a customer who might be some way distant from the direct point of contact.
Many operators would consider it an invaluable asset to be their own vehicle supplier—with distributors' discounts—their own bodybuilder, spare parts supplier and servicing agent, but although the Giltspur Ltd companies have all of these services in their related companies, they are not required to use them.
Self-contained company
Giltspur International Freight Ltd was very correctly described to me as a completely self-contained transport, shipping and forwarding, packaging and warehousing, domestic and international company where each of the constituents was as small or as large as the customer required it to be. Its development in Europe has gone on steadily and almost unnoticed since 1950. "It will continue to expand to meet genuine demand in growth areas," said an executive, "but we will never outstretch our resources." An annual turnover of £12m takes some stretching.