reaking out of the gloom
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A year ago Ryder's UK operation was up for sale—then the truck rental and contract-hire company's giant US parent decided to call the whole thing off, promising major changes to the business instead. Since then, a new broom has certainly been raising the dust, as Robin Means found out...
• When Commercial Motor pulled up outside Ryder's Slough headquarters recently, the skies overhead were decidedly gloomy. It just so happened that our visit coincided with the solar eclipse, After a brief period of near darkness, the light returned.
Ryder, on the other hand, passed through a much longer period of darkness in 1998, when the company was up for sale for several months. But like planet earth, it emerged just as surely back out into the light after its parent's eventual decision to keep its UK contract hire and rental operation. And it's now a fitter and leaner business for the experience. According to Ryder's marketing director John Wisdom, the company is on course to improve on last year's turnover of 1262m by approximately 5%.
One of the new brooms sweeping clean is MD Tracy Leinbach, who previously worked for Ryder in the US and has more than 15 years' experience in the industry. Since joining the UK operation at the beginning of the year she's made a number of changes to enhance the company's performance. "It was a wonderful opportunity," says Leinbach. "The first thing I did was to visit all the depots and some of our large customers: The employees here just wanted to get on with things, having gone through the process of the sale."
Changes
Restructuring has included changes to the way her people work. "We'd been very functional and had different areas operating independently and reporting to the MD separately," she explains. "If you were looking for rental, for instance, you'd deal only with our rental people. Now we can all take the full breadth of our products and services to the customers—and that breadth is one of our significant advantages.
"We've also pushed responsibility for customers and profitability further down to the front line, and that has helped to make decision-making faster and made for better decisions," Leinbach adds. "I can't always know what's going on out there in the market place and you get better decisions if they are taken closer to the market."
There have also been changes in the depot structure, with nine of the company's former sites being closed, leading to a number of redundancies. There are now 30 full service depots with a number of dedicated contract sites.
"We've looked to get the network most cost efficient," says Wisdom. "Some of the depots had come with acquisition of accounts and weren't strategically in the best place for us."
Leinbach admits the company lost some of its focus by trying to maintain the depot structure it inherited. "Just because you have some bricks and mortar somewhere doesn't mean it's in the best place for customers," she says. "In one case, for instance, we had two next to one another. If a depot isn't in the right location it's better to close it. The market moves on."
It's certainly moved on for those customers with whom Ryder has sought to renegotiate contracts with poor margins. "We had some problem accounts that we have worked through," says Leinbach. "Some major ones are now behind us. We've been successful in renegotiating many of the contracts and I'm proud of the organisation and how we've worked through those. It would have been very easy to throw in the towel and just cancel some of them."
The .£200m capital expenditure commitment for the UK is being invested in a number of ways, including fleet additions and replacements, upgraded information technology and improvements in the company's roadside service—an area "critical to all our customers", says Leinbach.
Tempted
With all this going on and a fitter, leaner Ryder than ever before, might the parent company not be tempted to put the whole operation back up for sale? Leinbach believes not. "At the right price, everything's always up for sale—you need only look in the Rio see that. If someone were to ring up with a good price, perhaps they might consider it. But we're no longer actively looking for a buyer." she insists.
So what is Ryder's strategy for the future? "We're going to continue going to market and emphasising strongly the flexible solutions we can bring to a, and we're better positioned than in the past to deliver on that," says Leinbach. "I want people to think of Ryder as a professional and premium service provider and for Ryder to be the premier provider of transport solutions in the UK."
Wisdom concurs: 'We're preparing ourselves to come openly onto the market and take a very proactive stance in it across all our products and services. We're back—and we mean business."