Delivering choice?

As the festive shopping period continues in earnest, I recall an article that I wrote earlier in the year for a leading retail trade publication, citing how important it is for retailers to offer a range of delivery choices to maintain their customers’ loyalty and satisfaction. I went on to ask the question “can we deliver a service fit for a king?” To my frustration and astonishment, flexible delivery options that offer true convenience are still hard to come by.

Back in 2010, I pondered how CitySprint could help. I came to the conclusion that many traditional retailers are not very experienced when it comes to distribution; getting this right, and meeting customer demand for flexible delivery options, would be crucial if they were going to grow their share of the lucrative online shopping market.

It seems to have been only too true when you compare business models such as Comet with the likes of John Lewis at the other end of the spectrum, who truly embraced this challenge. For the same reason, it’s easy to see why many “bricks and mortar” retailers have lost ground to the likes of ASOS and Amazon, who trade on the delivery choice and convenience that they offer.  Personally, I do not see this trend changing in the near future.

Over the next few months, I will be discussing this matter with many retailers and I will be challenging why their distribution strategies have not moved forward. I will ask why they are still not offering the choice of delivery services that their customers obviously want.

I do not see CitySprint as the complete solution; I passionately believe that delivery services such as same day, scheduled and evening delivery through our MyTime offering, are simply choices that should be aligned with every other possible choice, such as next day, Royal Mail, click & collect, delivery to a local store or a secure box and so on.

Delivery choice that enhances the client’s shopping experience needs to be at the core of every retailer’s eCommerce strategy.

If the customer is king, retailers should prove it.

Patrick Gallagher
Chief Executive of CitySprint (UK) Limited

National Pathology Year – November Blood Counts

Events and activities across the country have helped celebrate National Pathology Year, and reinforced the critical role played by the pathology services. November’s theme is Blood Counts, and of all the monthly themes, is probably the one that for many people resonates most.

Patients requiring blood are often on the operating table following an accident or invasive surgery. Survival depends on a number of critical activities falling into place, including the efficient transportation of blood or tissue from the blood bank to treating doctors.

Blood couriers have to be the very best in the logistics business. Every second counts, and time and road conditions often conspire to test even the most experienced driver.

At CitySprint Healthcare, blood transportation is an area in which we take great pride. Our work is diverse, and often requires enormous flexibility. The type of emergency transfusion delivery mentioned above is obviously challenging. We are also increasingly being asked to deliver blood supplies overseas, to places such as Gibraltar, where the logistics become even more complex.

We’re also extremely proud of our work for organisations such as the Anthony Nolan charity, where what we deliver is critical. We help transport the collected blood that would go to waste, take it to the bank and transport it on to the hospitals where patients need it.

When this work is combined with our routine pathology logistics, it’s easy to see why blood is very much at the heart of our healthcare business. For us, November’s Blood Count theme encapsulates the importance of our work and why everyone in the healthcare team feels they are playing a role in the health of the country.

Andy Turner
Healthcare Director

The modernisation of pathology services – what's next?

It’s been six years since Lord Carter of Coles carried out an independent review of NHS Pathology Services citing, among other things, a need for increased use of digital technology – including end-to-end management of specimen samples to improve safety and security for patients.

In the subsequent years the age of austerity has hit hard and the NHS is undergoing major reform, the greatest since its inception in 1948. The challenging fiscal environment is driving the need for £500m in savings and as such service reorganisation in pathology is taking place up and down the country.

As the Year of Pathology continues so does our focus in this key area of our business and so the CitySprint Healthcare team are heading to an afternoon of topical debate about what the future of pathology could look like.   

Hosted by the HSJ, ‘Pathology: Fit for Today, Fit for Future’ will discuss an array of topics including: drivers for change; the role of the private sector; what new challenges we face and the future of services in pathology. We’ll be actively involved in the debate contributing our learning’s; such as how we work with our healthcare clients and what insight we can offer from other parts of our business. 

Being involved in events such as these is important to us. As we continue to grow our Healthcare offering – we now work alongside some 20 NHS trusts and organisations - we must look for solutions that help our clients navigate change and meet stringent QIPP targets.

Technology is one part of pathology service redesign that can offer cost savings. PathTrak is designed to provide greater security in pathology transportation and is already in practice demonstrating cost efficiencies at NHS Trusts in the UK.

We look forward to the upcoming event and hearing what Lord Carter has to say six years on – we’ll report back our thoughts.  

Andy Turner
Director of Healthcare

Parcels on the rise

Ofcom's research into the needs of UK postal users made for very interesting reading today.

Our work in the retail sector certainly mirrors the findings that internet shopping is fuelling an increase in the number of parcels and packets that UK consumers are receiving.

The fact that half (51%) of consumers predict that they will be ordering more online in three years time and that, unsurprisingly, consumers want easier and more flexible ways to receive parcels and packets is one of the reasons we continue to invest in providing innovative and flexible delivery solutions for this sector.

Embracing the Olympics legacy

As London returns to normal, the Olympics and Paralympics may seem like a distant dream but beyond our impressive medal haul they leave a business legacy that goes beyond East London.

As with many businesses, at CitySprint the Olympic period provided us with a huge number of observations and intelligence for how we plan for and manage unprecedented busy periods in future.

In order to minimise disruptions to our services, we devised contingency plans months before the Games started, which included investment in leading routing technology, increasing our pushbike fleet, using van assistants and introducing a jogging and rollerblading team, which was a first for us!  No doubt, other businesses across London were also busy preparing for months in the lead up to the Games and adapted their business accordingly.

For us, the Olympics confirmed that lateral thinking and rigorous planning ahead really do make a difference. TFL praised London businesses for their co-operation during the Games but, perhaps more importantly, businesses learned that they could prepare themselves for all manner of challenges.  The Games also brought the World’s attention in such a positive way to our great city of London and to the UK in general, which can’t be bad for business in the long run!

It was an unprecedented time for CitySprint, but one we’ve learnt a lot from that will no doubt stand us in good stead in the future. I’m really pleased with how our contingency plans performed and how our own athletic team pulled together to maintain such a high level of customer service.

If we’re looking for a legacy, I believe London 2012’s, at least for businesses, lies in what can be achieved when we all work together and in being able to apply those lessons to future endeavours. Something that we’ll be doing at CitySprint as we prepare for our next challenge - the run up to Christmas! 

Happy Birthday to pathology – life-blood of the NHS

This summer we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the Royal College of Pathologists. At 3pm on 21 June 1962, 300 of the first members came together to formalise a profession which has subsequently made a huge impact on the quality of NHS services.

Fifty years later, pathology makes up around 4% of NHS spending, and is involved in up to 80% of all decisions affecting diagnosis. If you’re ill, or having your health checked, the chances are it will involve pathology.

The scale of NHS pathology means it is very much at the forefront of the NHS modernisation agenda, and the efforts underway to improve productivity.

Many people outside of the logistics business are surprised to hear how involved CitySprint are in this important NHS reconfiguration and modernisation project.  This is because pathology transportation is usually behind the scenes, and only really comes to people’s attention when things go wrong.

It’s said a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Stellar laboratory services are useless if samples go missing, are handled inappropriately or lack the watertight audit trail to ensure patient safety. Unfortunately, the quality of NHS pathology has been let down over the years by poorly managed transportation.

Where CitySprint Healthcare has been able to make a difference is by applying our experience and learning from other parts of our business where we transport high value and important cargo. Surely pathology samples should be handled in the same way to improve patient care through fast, efficient diagnosis. Importantly, secure transportation prevents expensive re-bleeds and safeguards irreplaceable biopsies.

Track and trace technology, real time digital monitoring, electronic audit trails. These are the sorts of things that I would expect to support pathology logistics if my family or I were involved. And that’s what is provided by our PathTrak system, which is increasingly being taken up by the NHS.

We’re proud of our contribution to the modernisation of pathology agenda, which contributes to patient safety, and is helping the NHS save money. We wish the Royal College of Pathologists a Happy Birthday, and look forward to contributing to the evolution of world leading NHS pathology over the coming years.   

Andy Turner

CitySprint Healthcare Director

The Olympics motto inspires forward planning - Citius, Altius, Fortius

The Olympic motto is meant to be inspirational…and it is.

The Games mean a lot to the athletes taking part, all of whom have been preparing rigorously for years.  They will have been inspired to push themselves to the limits in a bid for glory.  As spectators, we will be inspired by their athletic prowess and their jaw-dropping achievements.

London - its citizens and businesses - is slowly beginning to feel the excitement.  There is a definite buzz around the streets.  But that excitement is also tempered by the thought of the major disruption that will hit the city during July and August.

The distribution and logistics sector will be particularly affected, but we should all be ready for this by now.  There have been calls by some in the industry to allow greater access to priority traffic lanes.  There’s no doubt that a more equitable approach to the use of these routes would be helpful.

However, I think the best course of action is to think ahead and to be imaginative.   There’s no need for things to come to a complete standstill and forward planning will be the key to keeping London circulating as near to normal as possible.

At CitySprint, we’ve borrowed a leaf from the athletes’ training manual and we’ve been preparing for some time.  We’ve been inspired to come up with initiatives that will keep us delivering peak performance and help our customers to keep their businesses moving.

To this end, we've put in place a comprehensive contingency plan.  We’re increasing our motorbike and cycle fleet and introducing alternative couriers such as rollerbladers and joggers, as well as ‘courier assistants’ for our van fleet who will be able to walk packages to delivery destinations where the final leg of these journeys will be out of bounds for vehicular traffic.  We’ve invested in specialist route-mapping software and our couriers will receive daily traffic updates via GPS so they can select the most efficient routes and avoid traffic hotspots.

Perhaps, most importantly, we have assembled a dedicated team to respond to customers’ questions and help them with contingency planning.

We’ve also spoken to colleagues in Sydney with recent experience of an Olympic Games.  They told us about the importance of keeping customers updated.  They explained some of the impacts of heightened security and how Sydney’s central business district was effectively quarantined.  We’ve factored these insights into our preparations too.


We won’t be standing on any podium, but the invocation of the Olympic motto is definitely driving CitySprint to do the best we can.  I sincerely hope that the majority of businesses in the capital are doing the same.   Overall, the Sydney experience was seen as positive and I think London 2012 will be too.

Filling the vacuum

UPS has spent €5.16bn acquiring TNT Express in Europe. It’s the deal everyone is talking about and it raises some interesting questions. Perhaps the most obvious of which is: does this mean the market is now all but closed?

From where I sit, the answer has to be ‘no’ – at least not yet.

Yes, the amalgamation of these two giants will re-draw the landscape of the global logistics market - FedEx and DHL will certainly be thinking hard about what happens next. All the other large players will be busily contemplating what they need to do to stay competitive too. 

In the meantime, the debate about market consolidation rages on.

And while the leviathans of the industry dominate, they don’t actually define the entire market.  Between them, on the one hand, and the very small, local owner-operators on the other, there are acres of space. 

This is space that remains highly fragmented; it’s populated by a mix of different operators of different sizes each with different capabilities. Some operators have sectoral or regional specialisations, while others adopt a more generalist or completely ad-hoc approach. This is very much where the same day slice of the market is in the UK.

Arguably, this is also the space where the really interesting changes are likely to occur. They’re happening already and, in my view, they will continue apace. 

In the last year alone, CitySprint has made five acquisitions – two of which were quite substantial. It’s a strategy that enables us to build scale, extend our geographic reach and continually enhance the service we offer to our customers. 

This type of activity will set the industry up for growth and expansion in the future. The same day market will increasingly be about a few recognised brands with clearly differentiated offers – in our case that means excellent service, flexibility and innovation. 

Then it will be about filling that vacuum of opportunity. We can do this because we can be dynamic. 

For the large, headline-grabbing operators this may be less easy to achieve but that won’t stop the steady march forward of greater consolidation at the top end of the market. 

CitySprint delivers a fresh new look

As CitySprint launches our new brand identity today, it has given me an opportunity to contemplate what a brand really means and why companies rebrand. The English dictionary defines the verb ‘to rebrand’ as “to change or update the image of an organisation or product”, which is certainly technically true. Some people might see a rebrand as no more than a ‘lick of paint’ and, in principle, this is also partly true - we wanted a fresh, new image for 2012.

While we are very much the same company that we were yesterday, we have evolved considerably from the company we were when we launched our old brand, over 10 years ago! All in all, it was definitely time for an update.

Don’t get me wrong; our original brand has served us well. It was created at a time when we wanted to help give a more professional image to the same day courier industry. And over those years it has assisted our growth and accession to the market leader slot in the UK’s same day industry.

Importantly, our new image incorporates views from our clients about CitySprint and what it means to them and their businesses. Their generous feedback, through questionnaires, helped us to gain a 360° perspective. This feedback informed the key elements and messages that underpin the new brand. It reinforced the fact that our old branding needed a fresh, innovative look and tone and that it lacked some impact. As a result, it was our clients’ views that inevitably contributed to our final decision to freshen up our ‘look and feel’ but retain all the positive equity we’d built up in the old brand.

That brings me back to the question of what is really meant by the word ‘brand’. Well to me, brand is something that our staff and clients should be proud of – something that is based on, and reflects, our ethos and the reputation we build on the back of the service we deliver to our customers.

Brand is what defines a culture, not just how it looks. It is something that says you are proud of your achievements to date but recognise the value of continual improvement. The CitySprint brand is definitely more than just a logo – it’s a philosophy that runs throughout our company and which is summarised by our new strap line: ‘we deliver’. This works on so many levels. We deliver a service for our customers, on behalf of our customers. We deliver your best work, original ideas, valuable data, award winning designs, life saving organs, critical machinery and everything else in between. We deliver collaboration.

Whichever way you look at it, we deliver more than just parcels.

So, the new brand is less a new beginning and more the next stage of the journey that builds upon our successes to date and renews our commitment to service excellence for clients. I also think it looks nice and I hope you do too...

Be bold

I’ve never been a great one for predictions – they have a habit of coming back to bite you. However, the start of a new year is a logical prompt for a little thinking aloud. So here are a few thoughts.

The economic pundits are decidedly gloomy: the Eurozone is in crisis; the US is flat-lining; the UK seems to be not much better; and there is doubt over whether the so-called ‘BRIC’s’ can actually make any difference at all despite the relative strength of their respective economies.

Somehow though, the global macro-economic picture feels somewhat remote from what we’re experiencing as a service company in the UK. Volumes have been exceptionally high this Christmas and New Year with double-digit growth on the same time last year.