SOUTHAMPTON\\\ Cruising to success


Cruises may be very relaxing for participants, but for fowarder Southampton Freight Services they are an important part of their business. In fact, from a logistics and operational point of view, they are very exacting, says managing director, Ross Negus. “We started to do cruise ship


logistics back in about 2002 or 2003, initially outside the UK,” he explains. “Now we operate warehouses globally – in New York, Miami, Hamburg and Genoa, as well as here in Southampton - where we consolidate the cargo and deliver it direct to the ship,” he explains. Southampton Freight Services


(SFS) serves many of the big cruise ship operators, including P&O Cruises, Cunard, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian Cruise Lines and Celebrity Cruises, delivering anything that might be required in what is essentially a vast floating hotel cum entertainment venue, along with passenger baggage or even wheelchairs and medical oxygenators. (A portion of


the cruise ship industry’s


clientele, though by means all, are senior folk.) A couple of years ago, SFS even delivered a couple of specialist beds so that a paraplegic couple could go on their first ever holiday together. Southampton is still the main


UK centre for the cruise ship industry, and it benefits from the fact that the city is also one of the country’s main container ports, so supplies can be readily shipped in and out. Access to Heathrow for the many urgent supplies is also good. SFS will consolidate everything


needed for a specific ship at its warehouse at Totton on the outskirts of the city and deliver it to the cruise terminal. Amounts can vary, but it can easily be two or three truckloads per ship, says Negus. He adds: “Cruising is a growing


business. The shipyards that build the vessels have full order books and new players like Virgin are entering the industry. At the same time, the cruise companies are


looking at their supply


chains.” Keeping cruise ships supplied


is not an easy task though. Unlike factories or work sites, they move around and the logistics company may only have a window of a few hours in which to make the delivery – so preparation, and ensuring that everything is delivered in the correct order is essential, says Negus. It can also entail getting


material to and from some pretty inaccessible places. As well as supplies, SFS moves tools and


All roads – and rails – lead to Southampton


Southampton cannot be bettered as a location for a freight forwarding company, says Chris Green, managing director of Supreme Freight Services, based just outside the city centre and a stone’s throw from the port. So much so, that, while the


company is a major user of the port of Felixstowe – and Heathrow Airport – it no longer maintains offices at those locations, preferring to concentrate all its UK activity in the city. “We did have offices at those two locations but nowadays we have IT links to Felixstowe and Heathrow and we can do all the clearances here,” says Green. These days, all its office expansion takes place overseas, rather than the UK, he adds. Supreme Freight today has a


turnover of £67.5 million, which is expected soon to push past the £70m mark and employs a total of 30 staff. It has recently expanded its office base at Millbrook, in the


inner suburbs of Southampton. The company was founded


back in 1986, specialising in the then not so fashionable Chinese market which, as it turns out, could not have been a better choice for a small, ambitious forwarder. “Perhaps it was more luck than judgement, but China really took off and we have been very fortunate in the growth there.” Supreme Freight offers a full


range of FCL, LCL, airfreight, customs clearance, warehousing and, more recently, e-commerce fulfilment services, including weekly seafreight consolidations from southern China – it has joint venture partners in Shenzhen and Guangzhou and its own office in Hong Kong. “About 60% of our seafreight


boxes actually come through Felixstowe, but groupage is very big for us in Southampton,” Green explains. “The faster shipping services tend to be


Issue 1 2018 - Freight Business Journal


equipment for engineers working on the ships and it recently had to get some equipment off a vessel in Ketchikan in Alaska down to Juneau and onto a plane at Vancouver so it could be used for a job on the other side of the world. Cruise ship customers are also


very exacting. “It’s their most important holiday, so everything has to be perfect,” Negus explains. “Also, all the different nationalities have their own tastes and requirements, so it’s very diverse. These days, ships are designed for very specific clientele, be it families, younger people on ‘stag’ dos or older people.” That means that no two truckloads are alike. SFS has even delivered a mock- up Cadillac for an on-board production of Grease, the musical. The odd occasions when things


do go wrong in the cruise business – like a ship not being refitted in time – get wide publicity in the media, so everyone involved does their utmost to ensure that everything happens on time. For example, says Negus, “If


we’re handling logistics for a refit of a ship, there might be carpets coming from Ireland, other items from all over Europe, including large technical items that are required to move by air to the shipyard, which could be in the Bahamas, Italy, Germany or Singapore, for example, so it all has to be very precisely staged.”


into Southampton, and we have a fulfilment warehouse for e-commerce just down the road from here.” The latter handles daily orders


from Amazon and E-Bay sellers, which are picked and packed for despatch, business which has grown out of the traditional LCL traffic. Supreme can pay VAT and duty and customs clear on behalf of importers, a service that might become of even greater interest if HMRC should decide to crack down on rogue operators that fail to pay taxes due – as highlighted in a recent Panorama TV programme. And with Brexit looming, who knows what the possibilities are for companies able to clear goods in and out of the country, Green suggests. Certainly


Green is not


pessimistic about Brexit; he doesn’t expect that there will anything other than free movement of goods post-March 2019, and even if customs clearance were to be reintroduced in some form, it could only be to the benefit of freight forwarding companies like his.


Airfreight is important for SFS,


perhaps because it is a specialist in a city of mainly seafreight forwarders. It is recognised as one of the largest export airfreight


forwarders in Hampshire, and has an import service to route cargo into Southampton from across the world. SFS operates its own ‘coastwise’ trucks from Heathrow


17


to its own bonded premises at its base, which makes for much quicker customs clearance and lower costs than would be possible at Heathrow, says Negus.


Shipping city’s secret weapon


DataFreight is maybe one of the Southampton area’s best-kept secrets – but perhaps it shouldn’t be, says founder and director, Sharon Brown. The company’s specialist soſtware for international freight forwarding, customs clearances and warehouse management is today used by around 340 customers, she says. These range from freight forwarders like Charles Kendall Freight to express courier operators such as TNT International – and even a handful of non-freight firms like the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christies (who use DataFreight for their CFSP procedures) and the retailer B&M. “Many people haven’t heard


of us, or they don’t know the full range of services we provide,” says Sharon Brown. “But we have a very good reputation for technical and customer support, and we tend to keep our customers.” DataFreight, owned and run by


husband and wife team Ian and Sharon Brown, can actually trace its origins to Dover in the 1980s, when Ian Brown originally worked for a freight forwarder. He wrote an export customs module for the company and things developed


And were more checks


on foodstuffs from the EU to be introduced, Supreme has expertise in that area. “We work very closely with Southampton Port Health [operated by Southampton City Council] and we can advise clients what documentation is required


to


import food into the UK, not only for food for human consumption but also animal food too.” In fact, it’s the latter that tends to need more paperwork, Green adds. One of the attractions of


Southampton is the large pool of freight and shipping talent available. While from a technological and customs point of view, a freight forwarding office could be sited almost anywhere in the country, being close to the city centre and the main rail station is a factor in being able to attract and retain expert staff, Green believes. Southampton generally is a


well-connected city, with major motorways and a compact – and quick to use - local airport. Supreme even does a small amount of airfreight via this hub, mostly trucked to or from


from there. The company was founded in


the Southampton area, just at the time that the then HM Customs & Excise was developing something called Direct Trader Input, allowing the trade to link to its systems through


freight ‘community’


systems, including what was then the Solent DTI system. While having a large port and


its associated freight industry on the doorstep was a big plus, the company was established where it was for no reason other than that its founders lived in the area. DataFreight soſtware works for freight companies all over the UK, including most of the Dover clearance agents and the Heathrow courier community. However, the most concentrated areas of use are Southampton and Felixstowe. Providing customs clearance


soſtware is still DataFreight’s bread and butter, and this is complemented by a powerful and innovative freight forwarding system


and


soſtware, as well as links to major accountancy packages such as Sage (It is an official Sage


large Continental gateways like Frankfurt. Forty years ago, when Green


started in freight, all the agents were close to the city centre. “That was mainly


because


Southampton used to be an important cross-Channel ferry port, and you needed to be able to get documentation such as T forms from the lorry drivers to customs to have it stamped and back again to the drivers. I used to do it on my bicycle and there’d be a great competition among the dock runners to be first down to the customs office.” Nowadays, staff need never


leave the office from the point of view of getting the job done, but having the city centre on the doorstep is a big attraction compared with being stuck on a soulless industrial estate miles from anywhere – especially if you don’t drive, and many young people these days don’t. Being close to the city centre is also useful for visiting Port Health or dealing with the occasional piece of paperwork that Customs actually wants to see.


developer.) Now, the company


numbers 13 people, with employees from as far afield as Australia and Eritrea, along with a number of EU nationals. “As might be expected of a


major port city, there is a ready supply of people with IT or freight forwarding skills in the area”, says Sharon Brown, though in practice it nowadays tends to recruit personnel with a good knowledge of IT and technology and teaches them freight forwarding, rather than the other way around. That said, it retains ex-Customs man Bernard O’Connor as a consultant. The world of IT never stands


warehousing


still, of course, and as well as a new electronic air waybill – which will be covered in a future article in FBJ – the DataFreight team is working on a completely revamped version of its new soſtware, DataFreight for the .net platform. “While you can tweak systems, every so oſten you have to start again with a completely new platform, which is what we’ve done with DataFreight for .net,” explains Brown. “It will be on the ‘.net’ platform, and it will also incorporate extra features such as workflow management,” she says.


However, the past couple of


decades have seen a migration of freight forwarders away from the city centre to outlying areas where land and offices can be cheaper. Also, Green points out, many of the multinational forwarders have shut their regional offices, perhaps leaving just a sales presence. Meanwhile, Supreme is


pressing ahead with plans for a new office on the other side of the world, in Vietnam – most likely in the main commercial centre, Ho Chi Minh City. While China has fuelled Supreme’s growth over the last few decades, there are some signs that the headlong growth in Chinese manufacturing is slowing, partly because of efforts by the government there to cut pollution, and some factories have closed lately, says Green. Customers are looking at alternative sources of supply, and Vietnam is likely to emerge as one of the major new centres of production, he believes. “People there are very positive,


there’s a lot of labour and a low cost base. I see the future of manufacturing there, as well as in China,” he states.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20