99% On-Time Dispatch

Delivery time for customers is a key reason to stay or leave a label supplier. With your business potentially on-stop if there is a break down in your supply chain, we know the importance of delivering our end of the deal.

We have been beavering away on our IT systems and uncovering more data on our performance. Following on from October’s bumper sales month of £210k, we made a concerted effort to ensure delivery times were not impacted by the bulk of work we received.

We are proud to announce our delivery performance for November 2018 and let the world know we made 65 million labels that month!

Dedicated work by all the team and some welcome overtime for Christmas by a few of our awesome production staff, delivered that result! We managed to get 52% of the orders we received dispatched within 3 days! 23% were delivered within the 5 day timeframe and 24% within 9 days. Unfortunately, 0.9% of orders were delivered later than that.

Our Delivery Targets

We have been working hard on delivering orders more quickly for our customers for the last couple of years. We have made significant improvements in delivery time by managing our operations better and improving our IT systems to identify bottlenecks in production.

Targets are there to be achieved and once achieved, we aim to stretch our performance. Our target is to deliver 100% of orders within 10 days so we failed to deliver that, but only just!

We also aim to deliver 80% of orders within 5 days too but only managed 75% in November. We will work on that too.

Once we have achieved these targets we will work on improving them further but we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves!

Why do we fail to meet our 10 day deadline?

We are an honest family run company so we don’t mind sharing with you the problems we might face in delivering your goods as quickly as possible. Each case is unique as to why there is a delay but there are a few common reasons why we might fail to meet our targets on production and delivery:

• Awaiting Material Delivery: We may have run out of the material we need to make your labels. Some specialised materials have longer lead times than other and we may simply be delayed because we are waiting for the label material to arrive.
• Printing Plates: The majority of the orders that took over 9 days were as a result of printing plate issues where we have a delay caused by making a new printing plate for the customer. This is sometimes unavoidable when printing plates perish in storage.
• Tooling Problems: We use tools to cut your labels. Sometimes these become blunt and need replacing. We normally only discover this when we are trying to make the order. A replacement cutter takes 2 days to be delivered and there is no way we can reduce that delay if we suffer it.
• Machine serviceability: Our machines are not perfect and do have failures, so a couple of orders became delayed as a result of machine serviceability.
• Prioritising: Sometimes a customer will order their labels late and be in desperate need of their stock. We will move our production order around to help our customers and this may bump other jobs down the production queue. We assess the viability of doing this with the entire order book so as not to be detrimental to other customers.
• Errors: We are human and sometimes we make errors. We try our hardest to minimise errors and have workflows and work practices in place to minimise the incidence of errors but they slip through from time to time.
• Quality Control: We work hard to ensure our products meet specification. Sometimes things go wrong and we have to re-make a product due to quality control failure. We work tirelessly to minimise the risk of quality failure every time something goes wrong.

Commenting on the result, Danny Carr Production Director said:

We have been growing rapidly over the last few years and delivery times were under pressure. 18 months ago, we probably had 10% of production taking 10 days or longer to reach dispatch. It was unacceptable and we needed to take action.

We have managed to improve our ordering system to help identify problems with delivery before they become critical. Identifying issues further up the pipeline allows us to focus on the problem before it becomes critical and resolve it before we let a customer down.

The staff have all worked hard to make sure their jobs are done quickly and efficiently and I am very grateful for their dedication to improving delivery for our customers as I hope our customers are too.

If you want to find out more about how we can supply your labels on-time, give us a call on 01332 864895 or fill in the form below and we will contact you.