British marketing promotion firm MDA has broadened its exclusive delivery contract with expressparcels carrier City Link following several years of successful cooperation.
MDA supplies promotional materials for some of Britain’s biggest brands, including Coca-Cola,Cadbury, Bacardi, Virgin Trains and Barclays, to retail outlets, venues and events throughout theUK. From its headquarters and award-winning warehousing at Blackburn it dispatches over one millionorders a year, from simple items that can fit into a single envelope through to combinations ofbranded goods for a nationwide promotion.
Many of these promotions are time-critical as marketing materials often have to arrive atthousands of outlets in time for a campaign to be launched simultaneously across the countrywithout any hitches, City Link pointed out. MDA’s consignments can range from simple packages tocollections of around 20 items such as posters, t-shirts; bar towels and branded glasses that allneed to arrive together to support campaigns at multiple venues.
With such demanding timescales and varied requirements, MDA needed a carrier that wasflexible, responsive, reliable and secure, and it found the ideal partner in City Link, the premiumexpress delivery company. Indeed MDA has been so impressed with the quality of City Link’s servicesthat it now uses the carrier exclusively.
Dale Stokes, Managing Director of MDA, said: “City Link is more than just a carrier to us, itis a truly outsourced transport solution. It has really integrated into our business. City Link iseffectively our transport department. They are specialists at what they do and that allows us toconcentrate on being specialists at what we do, project management and marketing campaigns.”
For the past three years, two City Link client team members have been working at MDAheadquarters on special projects and pro-active service solutions alongside MDA staff to betterunderstand the needs of the business. Since the start of 2011, when City Link opened a sortationoffice on site, a team of ten City Link operatives has worked in shifts, loading MDA parcelsdirectly onto trailers, sorting them into cages according to final destination postcodes. Thisenables the trailers to go directly to City Link’s Coventry Hub, saving time and money.
“One of the main benefits to MDA of using City Link is its caged distribution,” said Stokes. “ We ship a lot of goods that can be easily damaged, such as glassware for promotions in pubs, orposters that can be easily crushed. We like the fact that our goods go directly into the cage atour premises and are not touched until the final part of their journey. It helps to improve ourcustomer service.”
City Link’s caged network is essential in providing the most secure next-day delivery servicein the UK. Parcels are handled as little as possible and travel through the Hubs in the cages rightthrough to the final stages of their journey. Other security measures include trailer trackerdevices that alert City Link’s central control room whenever a trailer deviates from its pre-setroute or makes an unauthorised stop, and the innovative VanCams that record activity both insideand outside City Link delivery vans.
