British express parcels carrier City Link has won a contract extension with Eriks UK, a leadingindustrial services provider, for delivery of urgently required components and spare parts.
“Many manufacturing companies in the UK rely on ERIKS UK to keep their plants running when aproduction line has problems that could cause it to shut down. When hydraulics, pneumatics orbearings fail, they call on the 90 years of technical knowledge and engineering expertise whichERIKS UK has to offer,” City Link explained.
As Eriks UK’s preferred carrier for the past eight years, City Link delivers next-day to ERIKSUK’s network of 76 industrial service centres, nine core competence centres, 23 fully equippedrepair workshops and 88 integrated on-site stores and procurement centres in the UK. But it alsooperates a Sameday service around the clock for emergency deliveries.
When an urgent order comes in, ERIKS UK picks the correct part or parts while City Link managesthe delivery to the end customer as quickly as possible within 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Customers can order up to 5.30pm the night before and City Link will deliver the next day, withERIKS UK using its own fleet of vans only for ‘last mile delivery’ directly to customers from itsdistribution centres.
“While the volumes are not high, Sameday delivery is a critical service for our customers. If afood plant, for example, has a breakdown and if we cannot repair the plant until the next day thenthe costs are very significant,” Peter Timbrell, Logistics Director of ERIKS UK, IndustrialDistribution, said. “If a factory is losing £5,000 an hour in lost production, waiting 24 hours fordelivery of a vital part would have horrendous consequences.”
As part of a global enterprise spanning 60 companies and 26 countries, ERIKS UK can supply morethan 500,000 unique industrial products as well as carry out services such as air leak surveys,vibration analysis and thermography. On a daily basis, it sends out components overnight to 200sites, mostly to its distribution centres but also to the on-site procurement stores which it runswithin many factories in the UK.
“City Link has maintained extremely high levels of service to our branches – performing wellabove the industry standard for next day delivery. For example in a recent month of trading, it was99.97% problem-free which I would say is pretty good,” Timbrell concluded.
