Regional Discussion

All - please see below email exchanges from some of our members on the above subject, we'd like to open this topic up for further Ediscussion and would appreciate any thoughts you may like to add.

Do you think we should add our own ha'pennorth?? Suggest to Birmingham City Council:- "Re the latest suggestion by Birmingham City Council for a Freight delivery consolidation Centre we feel the following matters should be considered:  Who will partner the undoubted highly complicated IT systems required to manage the delivery, tracking, charging and POS systems such a system would demand?  How will the costs be administered and by whom - how open a system of accounting will be employed for full visibility by all parties? Is the proposal for a lorry based solution or would the suggestion involve the use of freight trams as being trialled in several W European Cities - could this be used as a reverse lever on HMG to approve and fund the Metro extension into the City Centre?  In principle, the CILT(UK) can see many benefits from such a scheme, but its fulfilment will call for extreme professionalism and levels of IT integration never before witnessed in the Logistics and Transport Sectors”  An E-discussion between all perhaps? Kind regards,David Archer.Chairman – Mercia.

 

Posted on behalf of Andrew Newlove.

 

If this was airfreight or sea freight, they would use unitised containers. Ideally each originating company would load its own container, seal it and drop it off at the transhipment point.  The entire container would be loaded onto the local delivery vehicle at the consolidation centre.   One container would go to each store.  Supplier companies could choose the size of their containers – varying from small to quite large - but, like sea containers in miniature, (or the A1,A2, A3, A4 sizes of paper system),   the units should be of compatible   dimensions to allow stacking and multiplying. This will lead to some space being wasted and some 'air' being shipped by each supplier company.  But the alternative is hugely varying parcel sizes being stacked in the back of lorries, which will lead to wasted space anyway. Unitisation allows vehicles to be loaded more easily in order of drop-off.  There is much less chance of individual boxes being left behind on the vehicle.  If the charge was made according to the size of unitised container, then the supplier company can make instant decisions about which is the most cost-effective size of unit to send to any store for any given order.  If they don't have enough small unit containers, they will soon get them if there is this financial incentive.  The market will then regulate the consignment size and this will control wasted space.  This is coincidentally an argument for NOT charging according the unit's 'metric' (i.e.  combination of weight x dimensions, roughly equal to mass).  Standard unitisation would allow the local delivery vehicle to be equipped with suitable handling systems to deal with each size of unit or multiples thereof (like a container-handler at a major port, although in miniature).  This reduces the manual handling risk and need to control box weights.  (Unit weights would still need to be known to permit vehicle loading within axle weight limits - like a ramp agent planning the load disposition for an aircraft.)  When I worked at FedEx they used to offer a big discount for standard-sized packages.   Unusual shaped packages could be taken, but attracted a premium charge. If there was some product that really can't be shipped in standard unitainers, then maybe that supplier would be better off sending their own vehicles into Brum anyway - on the empty streets?  In this instance, each unitised container would be treated exactly like a parcel at a parcel sorting hub.  Each unit is bar-coded (like sea containers, each unitainer can have its own number, allocated to the supplier company - or the leasing company). The software for running parcel-sorting hubs is well established and getting cheaper.   You can to some extent buy it 'off the shelf'.  It would be so much simpler than trying to create a new software package that is full of glitches and cost.  As Bill Acres will know, the existing system that FedEx was using at its main hub in Memphis, dealing with many tens of millions of parcels from all over the world in a very short time span, would be much larger than anything Birmingham retail suppliers could generate.   Each node (i.e. shipping point at the end of a spoke - e.g. London) would be roughly analogous to a supplier company. Each supplier can be readily billed for the number of parcels and their total metric (size/weight) to have passed through the central hub. One argument against having company-dedicated unitainers is that they have to be returned to the supplier, normally empty.   However in Laura Ashley Logistics, we were legally obliged to recover all recyclable materials from our shops to our distribution centres (clothes plastic wrappers, hangars, cardboard, waste paper, etc. etc.)  where we sorted, cleaned and compressed it and sold it for recycling, achieving a much higher financial return than simply paying a local contractor to take it all away from each shop.  Possibly ordinary refuse could be treated the same way, reducing the costs of waste disposal for chains of stores. This would reduce the need for the city council to send its own refuse vehicles into town and reduce loaded journeys to landfill/incineration.  Backfilled unitainers can also be used to return all sorts of other materials such as obsolete or end of line stock, company mail, etc.  For larger products being moved between sites within Birmingham, the transhipment centre could work on a hub-and-spoke system. Finally, unitainers can be easily fitted with trackers and the sealing system improves security between supplier and shop.   The trackers serve a double purpose; allowing the freight forwarder (and by extension the supplier) to know where the container is at any one time, and also making it very difficult to steal the whole unitainer.   While the use of trams is a worthy consideration, I just can't see it working.    Anything over 20kgs will need two people to collect it from the drop-off point, and how on earth one manages the infrastructure of drop-off points at tram stops is a nightmare. All shops will have different delivery points; few will want to take deliveries through their front doors if they have a choice.    Surely the whole point of this scheme is that all suppliers delivering to any one particular shop have their loads consolidated in order that each shop only gets one delivery - probably at crack of dawn - right to their back door, from all their suppliers.  This dramatically reduces the number of vehicle fleets operating in the centre, but will not necessarily decrease the number of vehicles significantly - any reduction in vehicle KM will only be of the order of about 20 - 30%.  However vehicle size and utilisation will increase commensurately and the streets can be made more pedestrian-friendly during the day.   There is a corollary:  in-store staff costs reduce dramatically. For smaller shops, the goods receiving staff only have to be there for one delivery and its time can be reasonably predicted.  It is possible that the freight forwarder could let the store staff know when their containers were due - especially if there were multiple deliveries during the course of the day - much like the timing of buses on real-time display systems.    (You’re going to get 3 together...!)   Presumably the local delivery vehicles can be of differing sizes according to the type of product and size of unitainers they transport. Some of these will surely be hybrid fuel vehicles and environmentally friendly.  

Well, that’s my ha'penny.

 Regards, Andrew Newlove.

Posted on behalf of Peter Makinson.

Whilst I bow to the expertise of the logisticians in our midst, can I offer one small comment from a supporter of the tram? Using trams for distribution has been tried quite successfully in Amsterdam as an experiment. The intention now is to take it further with purpose built vehicles. However what you have in Amsterdam is a fairly compact city centre with a dense network of tram lines which cover virtually all the main thoroughfares. This gives lots of alternative routes and high levels of access. There are even diversionary routes with no regular services. This is in stark contrast to the UK where the only tram systems we have consist of one main route which gives limited access.  There are some other examples of freight moving by urban tram in Europe. In Dresden, Germany, two VW plants have been linked using the city tram network to move components between the two. There are 3 x 45 metre long units, double ended, of which two are needed every day to shuttle between the two plants. Sidings have been built directly into the plants so the Cargotrams do not hold up the regular passenger service. In case you think 45 meters is rather long, many of the regular trams run to that length too, with a capacity of over 300 people which makes our buses seem rather pathetic by comparison. They are so proud of their Cargotrams that they even appear on the real time information displays at the tram stops!  Zurich has introduced a Cargo Tram which is rather more modest in scope. A converted tram running to a set timetable visits different parts of the city each day of the week so that citizens can deposit items for recycling. Now remember that this is Switzerland where everything runs on time and people do as they are told, so again this has been a considerable success.  Moving freight by tram is nothing new. When we had a dense network of tramways in the Manchester area there was a parcels service run by the transport department which had specially built parcels trams which again ran to a set timetable. This was supplemented by an army of boys pushing handcarts who visited all the business houses in the city on a scheduled basis to collect parcels for delivery in the Manchester area on the SAME DAY! When the trams were abandoned this service was provided by motor vehicles and it was still going in the 1960s. Warehouses would still put a "TRAM" sign in the window if they had something to collect and the driver was required to watch out for these and call and collect. I have read that in earlier days if you had a parcel to deliver you could hand it to the conductor on any passenger tram and he would hand it in to the parcels office in the city centre. They used a system something like postage stamps to charge for the service.  Unfortunately there are very few cities in the world which have a really dense network of tramways in the city centres these days. In Germany many cities in the west put their trams underground and many of the shopping areas are now pedestrian zones. Most of the new generation tramways are single routes or at best no more than two routes in the city centre as the money is just not there to build the kind of intensive network which saw tramlines in all major streets in the early years of the last century.  

Yours historically,

 

Peter Makinson.

I cannor help thinking the Birmingham Freightliner terminal is already a freight consolidation centre of sorts - and that presumably has sorted the IT. Malcolm Pheasey - Member Strategic Rail Forum (and West Midlands member)