BY SHARING BEST PRACTICE, REMOVING NEEDLESS COSTS AND COMBINING RESOURCES TO MAXIMISE ECONOMIES OF SCALE, STANFORD’S DELIVERS EXCEPTIONAL VALUE FOR ITS CLIENTS
Stanford’s are storage, warehousing and distribution specialists. The company has three branches In Hamilton and another facility in Blantyre and, through various partnerships, operates a network that covers Aberdeen, Inverness and Dundee while a hub In Preston is used for cross docking goods for onward delivery throughout the UK.
Stanford’s undertake a range of storage services including:
• Goods received Inbound goods are checked to ensure that they are in an acceptable condition before they are located in the warehouse and recorded on Stanford’s inventory control system.
• Decanting containers Stanford unload goods from containers and places them on pallets before putting them away in the warehouse.
• Bespoke Inventory control Stanford’s inventory control system is unique and tailored
to its clients requirements. The Windows-based System performs a host of tasks such as delivering product and stock Information; facilitating multi-location control; providing individual item or batch bar coding as required; and, recording complete transaction history across all accounts.
The company places a keen emphasis on customer service throughout its business and to ensure that its customers’ needs are fully understood, monthly reviews are held at which all joint KPl’s and SLA’s are compared. In addition. Stanford’s directors hold quarterly performance and strategy review sessions with the senior teams of key customers to ensure that the company’s performance matches expectations.
Staff engagement is another cornerstone of Stanford’s success, as managing director. Frank Sweeney, explains: “We recognise that our staff are the backbone of Stanford and that they have been instrumental in helping us to achieve our success to date. We have regular monthly staff meetings and engage in town hall briefing events at which we encourage feedback from all staff on their opinions of the business.”
He continues: “Like any business we have several key quantitative measures of staff performance, however, unlike most businesses we are completely open and transparent with our staff and we actively engage with our workforce and seek their ideas on ways to improve our methods of working.”
The Stanford vision is, quite simply, to be the logistics partner of choice. “We utilise our experience of contract logistics and shared user processes to deliver tailored supply chain fulfilment solutions,” says Frank Sweeney.
In recent years significant growth has been achieved by extending Stanford’s service offering to new markets. For example, a move in to the Scottish healthcare sector has provided a significant income stream.
The company supplies products to all NHS departments throughout Scotland and plays a key role in ensuring the efficient running of the supply chains that serve NHS hospitals across Scotland.
NHS Scotland required an experienced 3PL partner to support their expanding warehouse and fulfilment requirements. They needed a company capable of flexing with their expansion plans that would also be agile and open to challenge existing ways of working and had the management structure and operational procedures in place to ensure that on time, in full fulfilment levels in excess of 99.5 per cent were achieved.
Stanford regularly achieve 100 per cent on time, in full deliveries and have reduced the unit cost of each despatch by a staggering 12 per cent by re-engineering NHS Scotland’s fulfilment model.
Indeed, the benefits of Stanford’s commitment to developing a close working relationship with its clients are amply demonstrated by the NHS Scotland contract.
Stanford’s Logistics Manager spent time ’embedded’ with the team at National Health Scotland’s NOC and it quickly became apparent to her that model of inbound supplier management operated for another of Stanford’s client could be adopted within the NHS NOC to improve its inbound fulfilment channel.
The idea was presented to the NHS and the solution was implemented. The change has saved the Scottish NHS significant inbound supplier costs – money that is now helping to boost the economic health of Scotland.
But, as Frank Sweeney is quick to stress, the company understands that there is a fine line between being helpful and being over keen.
“Notwithstanding, we understand that every customer wants a level of engagement and that this engagement level will change with circumstances and time,” he says.
“It is, therefore, our approach to tailor all business engagement via documented plans and strategies with customers, which we review on a regular basis. The result is we place resource where it’s needed when it’s needed to optimise the business performance of our customers and ourselves.”
Frank Sweeney adds: “By sharing best practice, removing needless costs and combining resources to maximise economies of scale we deliver exceptional value for our clients. We don’t approach our existing or prospective customers with a cost to deliver proposition, we provide them with value add solutions that are the best. and our level of understanding and commitment to delivering resources effectively is at the heart of our drive to be the UK’s most efficient. reliable and consistent provider of logistics services.”
Made in Scotland