By Ed Fraser, MD, Parcel Holders
We began our submission for The Vendies Best Innovation Award and Best Environmental Initiative awards with the words of US businessman Peter Drucker: ‘Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship; the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.’ We’ve adopted the quote because it’s spot-on when it comes to crystallising the benefits of using the unique service that is Parcel Holders.
We’re becoming the ‘specific instrument’ of those companies in the water and vending industries – Connect Vending, Water Coolers Direct, LTT and SnackTime, for instance – wishing to eliminate the inglorious hullaballoo traditionally accompanying a task you’d imagine would be straightforward: getting the spare part to the field-based engineer, whose customer is on the phone every half hour, giving him all kinds of grief.
Engineers seem to spend more time waiting for deliveries than Alastair Cook these days, and that’s in nobody’s interests. Our customers’ engineers are a resource, but they aren’t endowed with the capacity to create wealth when they’ve got one eye on the door and the other on Good Morning Britain…
By working with Parcel Holders, companies eradicate the aggravation surrounding spares. No more expensive deliveries not arriving, no more ‘the receptionist lost it’; no more spares that arrive broken… Best of all, no more wasted time and no more wasted miles.
That’s because of PUDOs – ‘pick up, drop off’ points. A PUDO is often a local shop, and when we say ‘local’, we mean within 5 miles of the engineer’s home. (Usually, we do rather better: LTT, for instance, has 14 PUDOs, all within a mile of an engineer).
PUDOs sign for packages, our online system messages the engineer and then, he or she decides when to pick it up: first thing in the morning maybe, or on the way home in the evening. No waiting around, no unnecessary trips. And if we don’t have a PUDO where one is needed in order to serve a particular engineer, we recruit one.
We’ve made quite an impact at Water Coolers Direct, as Peter Glanville will tell you. Man-hours saved: 305, litres of fuel saved: 1,689, CO2 saved: 5 tonnes. The company employs 13 field engineers and it realised that collecting a spare from HQ meant half a day off the road – dead time. The two-mile detour to a PUDO beats the 30-40 mile return trip hands down.
Their rate of ‘first time fixes’ has increased, as call-outs have decreased. They can hire engineers from further afield now: travel to-and-fro is no longer an issue.
Parcel Holder’s innovative service is a specific instrument of entrepreneurship to create wealth. It saves time and time is money and thanks to the elimination of unnecessary travel, (with its incumbent fuel consumption), as environmental initiatives go, it’s right up there.
As William Pollard said: ‘without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement.’ Parcel Holders delivers change for the better, all round.
Please consider casting your votes for Parcel Holders. You can click here to vote now, and thanks so much for reading our submission.
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