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Newey & Eyre haul back costs for suppliers

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Newey & Eyre, the UK's leading professional electrical distributor, has implemented an innovative collection service, which is already revolutionising its distribution network. The company has made a significant improvement in maximising the time its delivery vehicles spend on the road to reduce costs and boost supply chain efficiencies.

The new 'backhaul' service means that Newey & Eyre can now offer suppliers a collection service, so that they do not have to utilise their own vehicles for delivering products to Newey & Eyre's National Distribution Centre (NDC) in Runcorn. The company currently has 200 vehicles that deliver on outbound routes every day. There is enough capacity from these journeys to enable Newey & Eyre to collect or backhaul goods from Newey & Eyre's entire supplier base.

When suppliers use a third party carrier service an additional layer of complexity is added to the supply chain. This, coupled with the difficult transport infrastructure in the UK, can make delays unavoidable and rebooking of deliveries strips efficiency from the supply chain still further.

Newey & Eyre's backhaul service goes a long way towards removing these inefficiencies whilst reducing the costs of product delivery – resulting in direct savings for both Newey & Eyre and its suppliers. Also, backhaul enables suppliers to choose collection times that are appropriate to their own production schedules, and the process of booking into the NDC is entirely managed by Newey & Eyre. Late delivery issues and logistics planning headaches are completely removed, leaving the supplier to focus on production and picking rather than delivery.

And of course, these benefits are not purely economic – better utilisation of current journeys and the subsequent removal of up to 200 lorry-loads per day of national transport will significantly reduce environmental impact.

Since Newey & Eyre undertook its first supplier backhaul day at the end of April, 11 suppliers have come on board – all of whom are already starting to reap major benefits.

Andrew Holroyd, logistics development and UK transport manager for Schneider, one of Newey & Eyre's major suppliers of electrical power and control products, says, “We implemented the backhaul process after we'd experienced some timing and efficiency problems in transferring products into the company's NDC at Runcorn. Once the weekly backhaul service went into action, this issue simply disappeared. We have achieved improved product availability in Newey & Eyre's national network of branches, whilst minimising despatch and delivery issues at our distribution centre.”

Picture caption: Angus Fraser, chief executive officer of Newey & Eyre's parent company, Hagemeyer, outside the National Distribution Centre in Runcorn.

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