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Tele for the masses
Page 24
Page 25
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Teleroute's acting UK manager has spent most of his working life abroad. He tells Chris Tindall why it is that the freight exchange market in this country still hasn't been fully exploited.
Adrian Samuel hasn't lived in England for 19 years. Seconded from Teleroute's Brussels office while a full-time UK sales manager was sought, he is able to give an outsider's view of the way life here has changed. His observations are interesting.
The cross of St George!" he exclaims. "It wasn't around 20 years ago. except on a church steeple."
It's worth noting that Samuel's comment was made before England's football squad hoarded its flight to Germany and didn't take into account the outpouring of patriotic flag-waving that followed. And although a permanent sales manager has since been appointed. Samuel cannot have failed to observe the dubious rise of flags on cars, houses and even faces as he organised his return flight to Belgium.
The ex-pat's other observation of life here compared with a generation ago is depressingly accurate.
Lack of investment
"Infrastructure —my God. it really bad.Trains don't run on time, roads are clogged up, motorways, all of that. ft's the legacy of the Thatcher years. massive under-investment in infrastructure," he says.
Teleroute's origins are in France. Gerard Lamy and Bernard Perrier, creator and developer respectively of French legal publisher Lamy, hit upon the inspired idea of using telernatics to complement the publisher's paper products.
In the early 1980s. the company used the French precursor to the intemet,the Minitel, to publish the Tarification Routiere Obligatoire, or compulsory road-tax index. This enabled transport costs to be calculated instantly and accurately for the movement of freight across France.Teleroute's 20th-anniversary brochure modestly compares this single achievement with "Chinese businesses switching from the abacus to the cash register".
Its success led to an online freight exchange, where operators could advertise loads or empty trailers to other haulage companies needing transport or products. "Things developed rapidly," says Samuel. "Freight exchange is all about supply and demand, Once momentum started, it grew. It crossed borders into Benelux but not so much into the UK."
Continued expansion
By the midI 990s the exchange had moved onto the internet and expanded throughout Europe before opening its headquarters in Brussels.
Today, it operates on a subscription basis for customers in 25 countries. Its 45,0(X) users (1,200 of which are based in the UK) pay a monthly fee for access to the entire exchange, then pay a transaction charge per load that is posted or searched. According to Samuel, a freight forwarder looking for someone to transport a load back from Marseille to Ashford the next day can simply post the request on Teleroute's exchange. sit back and wait.
"The customers themselves may need to wait a little hit before they get a reply," he says. "When you're covering such a wide geographical area there are bound to be routes where there's very little supply usually more remote routes in the extremities."
Samuel joined the company in 2001 after working for advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi in France and FedEx in Paris and Brussels. He speaks fluent French,Spanish and Italian and describes himself as a European, rather than an Englishman.
"I'm privileged to have been born and educated in this country," he says,"because it is a privilege. English is a passport to business around the world."
He read somewhere that there are now 250,000 French people working in London. "That's huge. It's a wonderful opportunity to learn English and they realise that you need it to get on [in businessl. I've certainly been able to find work. The British. English, American way of doing sales and marketing is highly appreciated on the Continent."
However, what is not so appealing is our apparent unwillingness to make the most of Teleroute's services.There's the slightest hint of confusion over why this is the case. "We're still building awareness,Samuel admits. "In this country, [operators] have been quite slow to adopt the freight-exchange concept, probably because they have other arrangements which are working line."
Then, possibly betraying the difficulties all sales people experience, he adds: "One of the challenging things is to get people to devote the time; everybody is busy. People are very resistant to change."
Asked whether this widespread wariness of change is an idiosyncrasy at which the English excel. Samuel's reply is philosophical,suggesting years of experience in dealing with all manner of Europeans. "I think we're all human beings; we all have a shared culture, shared values, I don't believe so much in idiosyncrasies. I believe it's more to do with geographical nature."
His reasoning is that Britain's shape -and the proliferation of pallet networks obviated the need for a freight exchange more used to dealing with much greater distances. But he is adamant: We can exist side by side with pallet networks. I don't consider them competitors. We've talked to a couple of them; let's just say that discussions are ongoing."
Fuel efficiency
Samuel believes that empty running in this count!), is as high as 25 Ta .This is still much better than in previous years when fuel was cheap, roads were less congested and the emphasis wasn't so much on squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of the supply chain. The demand for Teleroute's services should he high.
But when Samuel is asked about its plans, there appears to be only one direction the company is heading in."Inexorably eastwards," he says."Turkey will soon be a focal point."
Teleroutc is also discussing multi-modal ideas with Norfolk Line and Geest and how they can support short-sea shipping. A gentle prompt from Samuel's PR representative yields a repeated commitment to build a UK exchange, something Teleroute is working very hard to do.
For an industry continually searching for ways to improve margins,. leleroute appears to offer a credible solution. But for the moment, winning the industry's confidence is the company's greatest challenge. As Samuel says: "There's an element of trust in road haulage. along the lines of 'we won't screw them over and we will deliver' .We recognise this." w