Kissing goodbye to Steptoe and Son
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NO MATTER how good you are otherwise, you're never going to make the best use of your skills or assets if you're not properly organised.
I'm sure most of us have seen a haulier's yard that looks like the set from Steptoe and Son.. A traffic manager might reproach a driver for keeping an untidy cab — and then walk back into his own office which is just as chaotic in its own way.
It needn't be like this. Road haulage is not a poor relation. To illustrate this I visited a wellknown international haulage company that had the chance of planning its depot organisation from scratch when it moved to a new site. The results are impressive.
Cave Wood of High Wycombe is a particularly valid example for two reasons. First, it is a privately owned company, not nationalised, and so any expenditure on the depot or offices must be strictly realistic and cost-effective; there's no room for empire-building, Secondly, a substantial part of Cave Wood's work is international, which naturally requires a far higher degree of organisation and administration back at the depot before the lorry even turns a wheel.
Cave Wood's first depot and headquarters was in Che-sham, Buckinghamshire, and the company grew up here. Grew is the operative word and by 1974 the Chesham depot was too small. Finding a new depot was not easy. The company wanted to stay in the same area since it had. built up a lot of local customers for its international groupage services and full trailer load work. And the Buckinghamshire area was ideal because foreign customers like the company to
be near to London, while Cave Wood find that a good deal of its work is originating or heading for the industrial Midlands, so being located to the north-west of London is useful.
Eventually, a site on the Cressex Industrial Estate in nearby High Wycombe was found and the company moved there in mid-1975. Cave Wood's operations director Paul Mainds takes up the story: "We at least started in a good situation with the M40 close to the depot. Unfortunately, industrial estate sites are not designed for road haulage operators; they are just too small. So when we moved here we knew we would eventually run out of trailer parking space."
When Cave Wood came to High Wycombe the site was merely a plot of land; there were no buildings on it, so the company set about designing a depot that would make best use of the site. This also gave them the opportunity to design a depot to suit their organisational requirements.
The company looked at the depot layout of some of its foreign agents to pick up a few ideas. The resultant depot is a threestorey L-shaped building with the loading bays and tractive unit workshops on the inner face of the building. This layout was chosen for two reasons which are worth bearing in mind if you're ever in the position of planning a new depot, and show Cave Wood's attention to its organisational needs.
First, the layout gives shelter to the loading bays and workshops — they are on the leeward side of the building, away from the prevailing winds. And secondly, any unwelcome visitors have to walk right past the front door of the building and round the edge of the depot to reach the warehouse. This affords a degree of built-in security which Cave Wood appreciates as it carries a proportion of high-value goods.
The vehicle parking area is in the space enclosed by the two arms of the L. There are about 35 tractive units and 180 trailers based at High Wycombe. Although they are away from the depot on international journeys for most of the time (particularly the trailers which are parked up in strategic places throughout Europe for return loads, etc) this parking area soon proved too small, as did the workshops.
Cave Wood had expected this and so was ready with asolution. It bought out a smaller haulage company that had hit a sticky patch but that occupied another site on the same industrial estate. This was VM Transport and was moved across to the Cave Wood depot while VM's depot became Cave Wood's trailer workshop and trailer parking ground. A private phone tie-line connects the depots.
The trailer workshop has two pits and two hardstands and is well equipped to carry out virtually any job on a trailer. Cave Wood uses this facility to the full; the company often buys used trailers and completely refurbishes them. Only the painting is sub-contracted because there is no paint shop.
The trailer fleet is varied to say the least, with virtually every major manufacturer repre• sented. Because of this lack ol trailer standardisation Cave Wood feels that it will nearly al. ways have the best trailer for the job. The majority are tilts, al. though nearly every other type or size is there as well.
Paul Mainds said that havin.c the trailer workshops anc parking area half a mile awa) rom the rest of the depot has lot caused any problems. Inleed, the trailer workshop oreman told me that it allows lint to get on with the major railer work without too many nterruptions. Fortunately, most sf the company's work is threeir four-day Continental trips and here aren't so many comings Ind goings at the depot which vould make the separation of he trailer area rather inconeenient.
The 31,000 square feet warelouse has four loading bays vith dock levellers and is livided into export and import ireas, holding and picking areas vith a separate bay for each desination country. As traffic grew, he warehouse became rather ;ramped.
Since there is a lack of space Or extending the actual buildng, Cave Wood erected a raised ftorage area within the warelouse — a mezzanine floor sup)orted on steel legs above part )f the warehouse floor. This is a J sef u I and relatively low-cost nethod of increasing warelouse floor space and Paul Vlainds told me that it has tvorked well. A mobile conveyor s used to get the goods up there 3nd down again when ready for oading. The raised area is also 3articularly good for storing ugh value goods, the extra neight providing a degree of added security.
There are two pits in the tractive unit workshops and their ousiest period is over the weekand when most of the fleet is back at the depot.
On the two floors above the warehouse and workshops are the Cave Wood offices. These are larger than one might expect to find at the average haulier's depot, with about 45 office staff. The reason for this is that Cave Wood, unlike many international hauliers, rarely works for freight forwarders and so does all its own forwarding work for its groupage and full trailer load international services. Therefore, the offices house forwarding staff as well as traffic planners. Cave Wood prefers it this way; Paul Mainds says the company likes to have control of the whole operation and work directly for the customer rather than using an outside forwarder.
The first floor houses the operations room. On entering, the first thing you notice is that it is a large, open plan office. Said Paul Mainds: "Our biggest mistake when first organising the office was to put too many walls in, sub-dividing the various departments. This hindered communications because we were always rushing in and out of the offices to speak to each other. So, over the years we've knocked down these walls and partitions and made the ops room one big office."
The room has several groups of three or four desks pushed together, with each group representing a different traffic destination area such as Italy, France, Germany, the Benelux countries and non-European destinations. These are for the forwarding staff. In the centre of the room is the traffic desk which handles all the traction, trailer and driver arrangements. In this position the traffic staff can liaise with the various desks around it, and I could see why those walls had to go.
Most people's objection to open plan offices is that they are so noisy. At Cave Wood this problem is largely eliminated by thick carpeting and a sound-absorbent ceiling, giving a hushed, muted atmosphere. Even with several typewriters going you can hear people on the other end of the phone, which is important when so many of the calls are to and from the Continent. One (red) telephone on the traffic desk is a direct outside line with a number known only to drivers and reserved for them calling in from the Continent for instructions. Sensibly, the only people who will answer this phone are those who are likely to be able to handle the query, so the driver isn't kept waiting for long periods, stuffing coins into foreign phone boxes as fast as he can.
All the desks are identical and the layout is designed so that if work on one particular area increases somebody can move across, complete with desk, to supplement the busy department — a good example of how something as simple as standardisation of desks can increase the efficiency of the office.
Cave Wood has invested quite heavily in modern office equipment including no less than three telexes, a word processor and a phone switchboard with 20 lines and 60 extensions. There is also an air tube system for senng documentation between the ops room. and the 'warehouse, which saves a lot of running up and down. It's all very impressive, but is it really necessary for a haulage company?
Paul Mainds pointed out that Cave Wood wants to reach the standards set by its customers because that's who the company deals with, not other haulage companies. Also, if the equipment is used intelligently its capital cost is more than adequately paid off over the years.
Over on one wall is the trailer board which shows where each trailer is, either loaded or standing empty in an agent's yard anywhere in Europe ready for a back-load. The rest of the wall space in the ops room is covered with maps of nearly all the European countries and a chart showing current exchange
rates. All in all, the ops room looks well organised and a good working environment.
Backing this up is a well-developed system of standardised documentation. With international work there is obviously that much more paperwork involved and Cave Wood has sensibly opted for a range of standardised pre-printed documents and paperwork. The same paperwork and methods of working are used at the other, smaller Cave Wood depots, so if staff have to be transferred to another depot to cover for sickness or holidays it's not too difficult to adapt.
On the second floor are the managerial and administration offices which include a secretarial section and accounts department. At present there is a computer terminal in accounts, but Cave Wood plans to replace this with its own in-house computer in the near future.
That completes the guided tour of Cave Wood's High Wycombe depot. As you can see, it's relatively small and compact, but is certainly well organised and a pleasant environment in which to work. The trouble with trying to assess depot organisation is that you can't always pinpoint any tangible advantages — the benefits are likely to be in terms of overall performance and the general smoothness of day-to-day operations.
Cave Wood has spent money and effort on its depot organisation but is reaping the reward. It also has a depot to be proud of and is only too delighted to show customers and potential customers around. Maybe this is the acid test — how keen are you to lay your depot's workings open to the gaze of a major customer? A customer's visit to a well-organised depot might even help win a new contract — and that is a tangible benefit.