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Nek tasks for transport and distribution managers
Page 52
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WHEN Mr Bob Beckham, the new president of the Freight Transport Association, spoke at a senior transport management course for members at Farnham Common last week he outlined the kind of administrative expertize needed by up-and-coming transport managers in the otvn-account field. Rather surprisingly, his message was that the operation of vehicles was the easiest part of the management problem; the difficult part lay in the area of documentation and communications control procedures for order processing.
The fast-growing trend, said Mr Beckham, was for tightly controlled total systems. Given that transport managers understood the principles of administrative and order-processing systems and that their company maintained adequate sales and customer data, all the elements for distribution planning were to hand.
This understanding of the total process of orderflow was the key in present circumstances to efficient operation. Distribution savings were mainly to be found in close control of the process beginning with a salesman's order-taking and its transmission to the supply source — by whatever means were appropriate.
After listening to course students' evaluation of a distribution exercise devised by Mr A. J. West, of RHM Foods Ltd, Mr Beckham stressed that transport managers should not necessarily be over-concerned to save money on present distribution networks if the knew that their company planned a major expansion More important than a saving of say £20,00( through a rejigging ol present distribution arrangements was a recommendation — if the facts justified this — to spend maybe half a million pounds on the distribution facilities that would be needed in five years' time. A failure to plan for the future could be disastrous, said Mr Beckham.