Our client provides maintenance services to Network Rail and has a team of engineers working in the field maintaining locomotives. They have unpredictable and urgent requirements for spare parts & consumables and because of the nature of the industry, downtime can be extremely expensive. Hence our client needed a very flexible service that could respond quickly day or night, seven days a week. The parts themselves can be extremely heavy and difficult to handle so a wide range of vehicles is needed to cope with the volume and weight of the freight. In addition to this our client required a return logistics operation to collect broken or redundant parts for delivery back to their head office in the Midlands.
With demanding service levels and a competitive price agreement in place we were able to develop a comprehensive and controllable service that allows the smooth flow of both outbound and inbound parts. Crucially, we could also deliver to ‘moving targets’ (i.e. engineers who had to move to a different location while the courier was en-route) which is where our live tracking system pays dividends. Liaising directly with the engineers, our operations team can track our couriers and suggest ideal meeting points or predict accurate arrival times, thus enabling the engineers to plan ahead and make best use of their time.