Temperature-controlled Culina Logistics has sponsored a spoof supply chain website designed to ‘ease the stress of today’s logistics and supply chain industry’. The site – superchaincrazy.com – features a ‘Dear Doris’ page for visitors desperate enough to seek her advice. Claiming to offer ‘an oasis of calm and tranquillity’, the site contains some tongue-in-cheek advice helping visitors to cope with; “warehouse worries, delivery dilemmas and transport tribulations”. Culina’s commercial director, Dale Fiddy, defends the light-hearted site saying: “The supply chain is a serious, high-pressure business, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun while we’re doing our job.” I quite agree. If you think that’s being childish? Let me regress you back… back… now tell me, what did you want to be when you grew up…? A truck driver of course!
NYK Logistics has provided a group of young pupils from the Ravenstone House Pre-Preparatory School & Nursery with an insight into how products are delivered to shops. Pupils Elliott Barnes-Ward (4) and Alex Pearson (4) got a first hand feel of how it looks and feels inside a cab. The group which visited the modern Grange Park distribution centre also got a look at how products are stored under temperature-controlled conditions, saw forklift trucks in action and watched Guylian chocolate being loaded up ready to go out to the shops. Two lucky students were then allowed to go swimming in one of the giant chocolate vats and… only kidding! Although at the end of the day the children were each presented with a chocolate selection bag courtesy of Guylian. Host and group distribution manager Andy Manning comments: “We were delighted to help the children of Ravenstone House find out how we store and distribute products that they see in the high street shops.”
Manning did not mention if any bedtime stories were involved but if delivery company Parcelforce Worldwide was there, it may have insisted on it having been forced to embrace a new way of thinking – in the form of creative storytelling. A company called The Storytellers was called in to help explain complex strategies and problems to staff and colleagues and in a fantastic turn-around, end of year profits are expected to be between £6M and £8M. After a formal tenure The Storytellers proved that its approach to employee communications, using colour comic strip storyboards with short speech bubbles, was right for them.
Speaking of tall tails, APC Vanco says it is the favoured travel agent for tropical fish. Gwent-based APC Vanco, part of the APC Overnight express delivery network, has seen a rise in the number of tropical fish consignments it is taking to and from the region. It is proud of its zero fatality record which has led to the company being the carrier of choice for some local dealers. I guess it is true what people say and there really is plenty more fish in the ‘V’!
And last but definitely not least, Logistics Link North this year was not all work and no play for everyone, as LM’s Circulation Fulfilment Manager Diane Foster discovered! Sorry Diane they made me print it!
