NEWS EXTRA
BRADFORDS: RESHAPE AND RENEW AFTER 250 YEARS
Bradfords CEO David Young told the BMF Members Day delegates about the actions his company is taking to rebuild after the difficulties of the past 18 months.
Monty Hall
that happens then you get happier customers and you reduce your carbon footprint because you are reducing transport use. if we’re not sustainable in business terms, then we aren’t helping the future
Monty Halls
Broadcaster, speaker, naturalist, former Royal Marine and marine biologist, leadership specialist Monty Halls took delegates through some of his epediaitons anf documentaries, giving an insight into some of the things he learned. He finished with an inspirational video that had many of the delegates in tears.
HAVING SOLD OFF both the timber engineering business Crendon and the timber distribution business Snows, Bradfords CEO David Young told delegates that the business entered 2020, its 250th year, as a builder’s merchant only, which stood it in good stead. “If I can get you to cast your minds back to the morning of Monday 23rd of March 2020, it started as a normal day when we opened up, although we had changed our processes and procedures that day. We had people manning the gates to control traffic as there had been rumours of a lockdown, and it was pandemonium with people panic buying left right and centre. What we wanted to do with our branches was make sure that that our managers were in control. That they had people on the gates, people on the trade counters, one way systems, and I was pretty comfortable that we were running the business in as safe a way as possible. We had a great day of sales, and then in the evening Boris put the country into lockdown.” Young said that the company had gone through various scenarios in anticipation of this, and that
October 2021
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he believed there was enough justification for the business to be able to stay open. ”I got on the phone to a lot of others to see what they were doing; some opened, some closed ,but we took our chances and stayed open.” On the morning of Tuesday 24th, Young said that the branches opened at 7am and it started off well, but escalated quickly. “It was chaos,” he said. “I had to make the decision to close our branches to collect business at 10am. To put that into context, we would normally turnover about £200,000 a day on collect business. In the first three hours of that day, we turned over £370,000. We closed because it had started to get out of control. I worked with our regional directors and that afternoon we put in place new procedures, opening to click -and-collect, phone-and-collect on Wednesday 25th March 2020. That was all about maintaining our control of the situation. Our people are what saw us through this period,” he added. “It was a horrible time, but I stand by our decision to keep open. Our people saw us through it.”
Bradfords as a company has always invested heavily in IT and
this also helped to get the business through the tough 18 months, Young said. “We were able to go to contactless collection and contactless delivery, and to keep in touch with customers to inform them about deliveries through the use of the right technology. We also had a website which became so important. Prior to all this our Yeovil branch, for example, would get 175 to 200 phone calls a day. When we stopped people dropping in and they had to phone through those calls went up to 3.5k a day. It forced our customers to go onto our digital platform.” He added that the company took the decision to close to retail customers in order to save products for trade customers, many of whom where self-employed and getting no help from the government.
“We realised that our people were going to have to be flexible,” Young said. “We had staff on our trade counters who had nothing much to do because there wasn’t the collect business coming in. So, we trained them to do other things as well, expanding their skills set by having them out in the yard picking, using forklifts etc. We want our people to be multi skilled so they can work in all areas of the business. The pandemic also meant that we would lose people through being told to isolate for a while so we knew everyone had to be flexible to cope with that too”. Moving forward, Young said that Bradfords is looking to continue with many of the initiatives it has brought in. “We are trying to be a mobile as possible, using mobile- based receipts which allow us to book in stock delivered in real time and capture variation. We have introduced mobile picking on the customer side, which allows us to digitise the process. We are developing a mobile stock App which we think will reduce stock take time by two-thirds.” BMJ
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