Customers increasingly demand a comprehensive transport and storage package, and
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Bristol-based 011is Transport is fully aware of this fact— as well as 25 trucks the firm has its own warehouse. As Miles Brignall reports, expansion is the name of the game. There aren't many haulage companies which can boast having an ex-county cricketer on the board or an electric fence around their depot, but 011is Transport has both. Richard 011is played alongside Ian Botham for Somerset in the Seventies and the firm has a police-approved fence to deter any unauthorised entry into the site, close to the M4/M5 interchange in the booming area round Avonmouth.
"It's not because we house anything of great value, it's there to keep kids out at night," says 011is commercial director Stephen Hall. "I can tell you, you certainly wouldn't want to touch it—one of our staff did and quickly announced he wouldn't be doing it again!"
Hall is one of three directors who now run the family firm that dates back as far as 1908. The founder's grandson, Dick 011is, is still the chairman.
"Like many hauliers. I think our operation started with a horse and cart and developed from there," he says. "At one point there was also a bakery and even a funeral business. However, the company really took off when our current chairman returned from National Service."
Consumer goods
011is moved to its current site in the '905 after a supermarket chain made the firm an offer it couldn't refuse for its original premises in Keynsham, near Bristol. Today the company boasts a fleet of 25 vehicles and around 5,400m2 of warehousing, and specialises in distributing FMCGs—fast moving consumer goods. D "All our stuff is ambient temperature—we don't do any chilled work—and it's all palletised," Hall says. "We took a deliberate decision not to take hazardous goods or any chemicals so there is no possibility of contamination, and it's a combination that has done us well.
'I know some firms make more out of the warehousing than they do the distribution, but this is not the case for us. The warehousing is very much there to complement the transport operation and it is all certified as food safe. All our clients' goods are carried on a shared-user basis and we distribute all over the UK. Other companies' goods come into our warehouses for onward delivery all over the South-West and most of Wales."
011is's warehouse is open and receiving goods from o6:o ohrs on Monday morning until moohrs on Saturday every week, and in most cases goods arriving one day are dispatched the next.
Supply chain
For our largest customer, Amcor Flexibles (Colodense) we now manage their entire supply chain," he says. "We started off just distributing the printed food packaging they produce. They then asked us to store all their finished goods and now we hold all the raw materials as well. We have a computer terminal at our premises and someone watching their orders. When one comes in it is all dated. We pick the materials they will need and they are sent out in good time to be processed."
This is not the firm's only dedicated contract; it has three other EDI (electronic data interchange) terminals in its offices, each supplying detailed order information from its customers in real time. Again, like many other firms in this line of business, 011is has gone down the partnership route and has a reciprocal arrangement with Barnsley-based JDF Logistics. Every night the two companies exchange a full trailer in the Tamworth area—an arrangement, Hall says, which works well and is, in his opinion, the shape of things to come. 011is has also recently joined the pallet-sharing network Weaver Pallet Express which, again, is "going well so far".
"The Working Time Directive's implementation will mean that every company is going to have to examine the way it operates. It looks certain that trucks will not be able to cover the same distances once drivers' hours are reduced," he says. "The greater use of partnerships will be one way to get round this, but it's going to be tough."
Hall fears the directive will only increase the company's wage bills, as drivers do fewer hours for the same pay and increase demand for agency drivers, which is a development he is not mad about: "We had a vehicle stolen last year when an agency driver had got lost on the way to a delivery. He got out of the cab to ask directions and when he returned a few minutes later th: buck was gone. I'm not saying that these things don't happen to our own drivers, but let's just say, it's more unusual."
Hall says hauliers in Avonmouth are fortunate to have the choice of which trucks to run as all the manufacturers have a big presence in the area. 011is runs an almost exclusively Scania fleet although it is currently operating a Volvo FHI2 which, he says, is "as much about giving us a comparison as anything". The company buys new, either on contract hire or outright on repair and maintenance deals. It used to carry out all its own maintenance but according to Hall the deals offered by the manufacturers meant that it was no longer viable and it was closed.
"The Scania tractive units are very good on fuel and we get around 9mpg. The Volvo has the latest 38ohp engine and the best figures we've had out of it are in the upper eights. The Scania rigids aren't quite as good on fuel as they could be, but that's probably down to the multi-drop work that they do."
Buclde-less curtainsiders
The company operates 25 trailers, many with budde-less curtainsiders, and is about to take delivery of four new Lawrence David trailers.
And what of the future? "We are already thinking about expanding the warehousing again. Given the current demand for warehousing in this area, expanding it is as riskfree an exercise as is possible. We will need some more rigids in the near future if some of the contracts we are bidding for come off, and another thing we are looking at is gap insurance for all our fleet. A tractor was involved in a bad accident recently and will probably be written off. The gap between its value at the time of the crash and what's owing on it is almost ir7,000—I don't think we'd want to swallow a hit like that again, so it's insurance for us in the future."