TNT's quality key
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• The future success of transport companies will depend on their ability to improve service quality, predicts Alan Jones, managing director of TNT Roadfreight IJK.
Jones, speaking to a packed meeting of Chartered Institute of Transport members in Birmingham last week, told them: "Service quality is what TNT is all about and our rapid growth in the UK and worldwide is due to this.
All the most successful companies are obsessive about service quality — transport and distribution service companies that succeed will be those which provide good reliable service and charge the right rate for the job. Poor service is usually the result of price cutting."
The C1T conference, on `Transport in the new operating environment', heard Jones talk about TNT's headlinehitting role in moving Rupert Murdoch's News International newspapers out of Wapping.
"Distribution is specialist work," says Jones. "More and more, big companies are deciding to concentrate investment and management time on their mainstream business, leaving transport and warehousing to the specialists.
"It is up to us specialists to be on the look out for innovations which can improve service and cut the costs for our clients," he claims. "TNT was able to help Murdoch cut his workforce by 300, simply by identifying the unnecessary and time-consuming practice of address-labelling bundles of newspapers."
Despite the company's obvious unpopularity with the strikers picketing the Wapping plant, TNT recently received an unexpected accolade from the Transport and General Workers' Union when Jack Ashwell, National Secretary of Commercial Road Transport, publicly stated that TNT's terms and conditions of employment for drivers were the highest in the country and a model to other companies.
"We pride outselves on our good industrial relations," says Jones, "and we've got that because we believe in honest communication and full consultation with all members of the workforce."
Big spending on information technology is a feature of TNT's determination to keep on growing. Its new computer in Birmingham cost £7 million and can handle 33 million instructions per second. "It will take the company forward into the 1990s," said Jones, "and puts us light years ahead of the opposition."
El TNT Parcel Office has just been launched as the new name to replace TNT Despatch Post.
According to Ken McCall, TNT's general manager, Express Parcels, the name has been changed to offer a more relevant and stronger identity in the market place.
"It will enhance the strong reputation of our offices for a fast and reliable service," says McCall.