IF ifty new MAN TO-As joining a fleet of more than
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150 trucks and 200 trailers—but they aren't into haulage and never take a backload. Refrigerated warehousing with room for 67,000 pallets handling 5,000 pallet movements a day—but they aren't into storage. And r.5 million pallet movements a year, carrying goods worth more than Libn—but they aren't into logistics.
So what is Boroughbridge, Yorkshirebased Reed Boardall up to, and how does it turn over L27m a year?
Group managing director Keith Boardall sums it up in a word: "Distribution". But that hardly seems an adequate description of the activities of what is perhaps the largest independent consolidation centre in Britain for suppliers of chilled and frozen goods to all the major supermarkets.
Boardall got into the distribution business back in 1977 when he was offered
some shares in a cold storage business. With a background at Imperial Foods he'd used such services before, and he was interested. "I saw there was a niche market there for doing things right, so that if someone arrived to take some product away you could actually tell them where it was in the store, and then give it to them," he explains.
Initially, Reed Boardall used the haulage services of Wilson Transport for delivery to supermarkets, but in 1988 it bought out the company complete with 30 artics, including ro reefer semis. "They were doing a lot of our distribution but we thought we could run it better as an integrated operation," says Boardall. 'Once we'd bought it we decided to concentrate on the temperature-controlled side and sold all the non-reefer trailers."
Over the next few years the company took advantage of spare capacity on the exWilson site to build an impressive cold storage facility which has been expanded
every year or so to its present size of 67,000 pallet spaces.
And it was all put together without the aid of consultants or specialist engineers. "I'm an accountant by profession," says Boardall. "So I did the arithmetic on the heat loss, surface areas, and so on for myself to work out the refrigeration requirements. You need to extract a certain amount of heat, so you size the plant on the basis of the time it will take to remove that heat and then build in a safety net as Murphy's Law often applies."
The independent attitude extends to power supplies—the company has its own backup generators: "We can generate our total electrical requirements for normal running 24 hours a day," says Boardall.
Managing director of the Reed Boardall transport operation is Torn Cassells, whose other passion in life is aerobatics. He came 24th in last year's World Air Games championships and has been representing Great Britain since 1996. The
ty to this achievement, he says, is confi!rice, but that must never turn to arrogance. it does, he warns, "It can get very essy.. whether you're talking about flying, !ople or business."
ohilosophical
assells has to deal with some of the most !rna nding delivery patterns in the business, id he confirms that dealing with supermartts isn't always easy. Their ordering patterns we moved from weekly to seven days a eek. Because of concern over possible tack-outs" they sometimes require two or .ree deliveries a day of the same goods to .e same location so a phlegmatic nature is a !finite asset.
What about those infamous waiting :nes? Cassells is equally philosophical: "Yes, e do get kept waiting. But when you get 50 rn-long vehicles on a site you need a bit of iace to manoeuvre them. Often, large RDCs we space constraints so timely arrival of !hides is important."
However, he warns that vehicle turnound times will have to be addressed when ,e Working Time Directive comes into force cause drivers simply will not be able to ing around. "UK haulage plc needs to turn !hides round quicker," says Cassells. iveryone in the supply chain needs to look this."
But while the working time rules may help :solve this, they will also cause problems ith drivers, and the company is resigned to .panding its team of drivers way beyond the irrent 220. Have they considered using ibhies? "We never use subcontractors," says oardall. "Goods arrive in our wagons with ir drivers. We've a responsibility to our cusmers and we sell ourselves on that basis." Keeping those drivers content was a key ctor in the company's choice for its latest itch of new vehicles. "I think the new TGs look very good and they're going to be !ry much the driver's choice,' says Cassells. We're very keen to ensure all our drivers are the best possible environment," So why 4tohp 6x2s ? "That's the power rating MAN recommended, given the work," he says. "And 6x2s mean flexibility, We don't need to worry about the weight, we can take anything,"
The company generally buys standard vehicles rather than worrying about driveline combinations. "We buy what they've got—and if it doesn't suit us we'll kick their bums from here to tomorrow!" says Boardall. "All I'm interested in is how much it will cost a week over a fixed term and what mileage I'll get from it," So what mileage do they get? "Across the fleet, around 8.5-9.0mpg," says Cassells, though as they rarely pull their maximum plated weight, this figure isn't too surprising.
None of the company's vehicles is kept for longer than three years, he adds: "Most people who have company cars don't have them after three years; why should our drivers?" It's also about maximising reliability and keeping up to speed with technology, he adds.
Flexible
The last of the so TG-As is due to join the fleet in October, and the company has also recently taken delivery of five rear-steer Gray & Adams double-deck trailers which can take 40 pallets apiece rather than the standard 26. Not all the sites Reed Boardall delivers to are geared up for double-deckers but they can always be used as single-deckers with room for 24 pallets. And loading/unloading doesn't have to take longer. "Actually, we can often offload faster than two standard trailers because of the need to change the vehicles around," says Cassells.
Like the rest of the 200strong trailer fleet (most of which were also supplied by Gray & Adams) the new arrivals are fitted with Courier fridges. This is a company that likes to find one supplier and stick to it, Boardall explains: "We don't like swapping about, whether on building contractors or road vehicles."
The obvious exception to this rule is its choice of tractive units, which are split roughly fifty-fifty between MAN and Scania. They all run at 38 or 41 tonnes. The company is considering taking advantage of the new 44-tonne limit on the double-deckers, but as Cassells points out: "Because we carry such a mixed bag, weight is rarely an issue. Volume is usuNlly the key."
Contract hire is currently the preferred method of acquisition, though the company used to buy most of its vehicles outright with some hire purchase. "We like to have flexibility in the fleet and ownership just wouldn't give us the same flexibility," says Cassells.
Keeping flexible means you can react to changing business conditions but some factors are hard to accommodate. Inevitably, the cost of fuel tops this list, with the company's vehicles racking up an average of 26 million kilometres a year. "If they'd seriously looked at fuel in the last Budget it would have been one of the best things they could do to put some zest back into British industry," says Cassells. "Instead they've really missed a trick."
Boardall agrees: "We've never had anything and we never get anything. We've still got the most expensive fuel in Europe. You can accuse them of many things, but not integrity!"