Truck and Track Autumn 2021

Truck and Track Autumn 2021 www.truckandtrack.com 42 UPN – (UNITED PALLET NETWORK) – FINALIST – MULTIMODAL – PALLET NETWORK OF THE YEAR 2021 drives standards, service levels, and overall performance, which can only be good for service users. In the Pallet Network Sector there is a real focus on customer service excellence supported by high quality IT systems to ensure total client visibility. Pallet networks are a unique logistics sector; they are the greenest and operate at optimum capacity at all times unlike some other Logistics sectors which often run close to empty. Pallet Networks are now seen as a complementary service working for companies in conjunction with or replacing the standard 3PL service offerings. Pallet Networks are highly responsive and flexible and it’s probably this USP that is seeing the sector become the fastest growing sector in UK Logistics. UPNs growth over the years has been very consistent, has this been a deliberate decision and how have you been able to maintain such a steady stable growth trajectory? Absolutely, this has been a very deliberate and considered decision. A growth approach of steady stable development as a network has been a key to our long term success. It has enabled both UPN and our members to evolve smoothly as a nationwide team of collaborators. We work with, and for our members, to build our business by helping them build theirs, its real partnership. UPN is quality focused not volume driven. Service always comes first. Talking about the importance of IT in the Pallet Network Sector, UPN is renowned for its bespoke IT support systems which are the envy of some of your competitors, how did this focus on bespoke IT support evolve? It was clear that the sector wasn’t offering IT solutions that were keeping pace with what was required, and UPN saw an opportunity to establish a clear point of difference by moving into the forefront in this area. It would have been very easy to go to the market and utilise systems that were already out there but we decided that this approach would only give the same support as our competitors and for us this simply wasn’t good enough. We took the decision very early on to be in control of UPN IT support by having our own bespoke internally designed and developed IT systems. We recognised that good IT platforms would be the key to a successful network but it was important to have the right offering to our members and customers. We worked closely with members and customers to design and build IT support systems that gave them exactly what they needed. An excellent example of this was live track and trace and signature capture, UPN were the first network to offer signature capture at point of delivery. We continue to invest strongly in this area continuing to come up with new ideas to keep us ahead of our competitors. Seeing some of them now adopting our ideas can only be a compliment to us. Each of the eight Pallet Networks seems to have its own identity, focus, and objectives. How do you see UPN in this context? How would you define UPN as unique? The Pallet Network Sector is seeing tremendous growth UPN saw an opportunity to establish a real point of difference with its bespoke IT support