DRIVING COMMUNICATION

Mike’s Monthly Message 67 – July 2017

Core Objective 1 – Retention of staff

Last month we had a long list of new starters joining the permanent workforce at ILG. For all those who have joined in July, I hope that you are settling in and if I have not met you already, I look forward to meeting you soon.

• So, this month we welcome:

o Timilehin Akanbi – Support IT Support Assistant at Burgess Hill o Karen Bennet – Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 2o Kelly Smith - Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 2o Moses Kagumire - Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 2o Anna Bienia - Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 2o Adrian Lowther – Cleaner at East Grinstead o Oscar Eastop – Placement Marketing Assistant at East Grinsteado Paula Morley – Customer Service Account Executive at East Grinsteado Callum Clift – Customer Service Account Executive (Management Trainee) at East Grinsteado Glenn Clayton – Warehouse Assistant at Burgess Hillo Jacob Sutton – Warehouse Assistant at Gatwick Gateo Beckham Cox – Apprentice Warehouse Assistant at Gatwick Gateo Leon Holiness – Apprentice Warehouse Assistant at Burgess Hillo Guy Collard – Warehouse Assistant at Burgess Hillo Ibolya Hadi – Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 7o Hannah Kenyon – Apprentice e Warehouse Assistant at East Grinstead o Zsuzsanna Lazar – Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 2 o Darren McNeill – Driver at Gatwick Unit 25o Daniel Meech – Apprentice Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 2o Sahil Rana – Warehouse Assistant at Gatwick Gateo Luke Valente – Apprentice Warehouse Assistant Sterling Park Unit 2

• And so far in August we will be welcoming:

o Fabakary Manneh – returning to ILG as a Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 2o Robbie Saunders – Warehouse Assistant at Burgess Hill

I hope you have a long and rewarding career at ILG.

• Sadly, we have some leavers this month too. In East Grinstead; Trevor Davies, Hayleigh Simpson, Marta Sobol and Gabor Erinecz. From Sterling Park; Paulo Teixeira, Zsolt Kotany, Alex Smith and from Burgess Hill, Jon Mason. We wish you all the best in the future.

• Alex Harvey will also be leaving his one year placement in our marketing department to return to University and finish his degree. We wish you all the best with that Alex and keep in touch.

• Many congratulations to Marek Stiewe who started his new role as Section Warehouse Manager at Gatwick Gate on 26 June. We also welcome back Nicolae Stanca who started his new role as Team Leader at Gatwick Gate on 28 June.

• Also congratulations to Emily Downer who became our Fulfilment Section Manager at Burgess Hill on 24 July and to Tom Kirby who will be starting as a Driver on 31 July.

• We have taken the opportunity to re-structure the management positions at Sterling Park to give greater support to our key clients. As you may have heard Laszlo Bartok continues his rapid development at ILG and becomes the Acting Warehouse Manager with effect from 1 August. Supporting him in a new position of Goods in & Stock Control Manager for Units 2 and 7 will be Dan Sawyer. In addition, Sarah Woodbridge has been appointed Operational Team Leader for Charlotte Tilbury and Anthony Brady becomes Re-Work Team Leader. Directing operational activity for Charlotte Tilbury specifically will be Sarah Mitchell-Voice.

I’m sure you’ll join me in congratulating everyone on their new well-deserved positions and wishing them all the best for the future.

• Many congratulations to Sam Taylor who returned to ILG this month as Customer Relationship Manager after graduating from Sussex University with a first class BSc (Hons) degree in Business and Management Studies.

• Congratulations to James Graham on his 10 year anniversary with ILG. James joined us when his employer closed their facility across the road from our Burgess Hill site. James is still here in the Burgess Hill Goods In team albeit in a supervisory role now. In a business that is ever growing we need really stable people that just do a great job every day, With James working in the same team, in the same warehouse for his whole ten years we know this is one thing we can just tick off the list. He continues to be dependable and solid for us and I am delighted he has stayed the course to reach his ten year service award. Thanks for everything James.

SMOM

In June we had a total of 37 votes and considered 28 nominations, these included: Warren Hunt, Mark Williams, Phil Clyne, Tim Stevens, Kieran Hawton, Craig Boxall, Tom Sumpter, Jack Fountain, Alex Saunders, James Godsell, Kamil Idezak, Hannah Chaffe, Ema Claudino, Paul Saunders, Paul Woodbridge, Marianna Kovacs, Lauren Whatford, Luke Bannerman, Vince Corps, Thomas Kirby, Paulo Teixeria, Jane Price, Kyle Newman, Chloe Sayers, Emma Brander, Liam Webb, Mark Williams and Jake North.

In third place receiving £50 is Kamil Idezak - Kamil was nominated for his attention to detail, communication, willingness to help others and his forethought in planning ahead for his account. Kamil is constantly on the ball when dealing with or resolving any issues, this results in his outstanding daily management. He is always willing to help and ensure orders go out even when problems arise, really showing his determination.Well done, Kamil.

In second place receiving £100 is James Godsell - James was nominated for his management of work, commitment and his overall performance. James kept up to date with any tickets and other aspects of IT whilst covering, as well as finding time to assist with any development work without a

problem. He has received considerable amount of positive feedback which greatly credits the business. Congratulations James.

In first place receiving £250 is Jack Fountain - Jack was nominated for a few reasons, these included his willingness to help others, going the extra mile to make sure targets are met and continuously working in an organised, professional manner. Jack makes an ongoing effort to ensure there is high team morale, improving current systems that are in place and making sure that all is fulfilled within the deadline provided. This is what some of his colleagues said about him:

“He was been a nothing more than an absolutely star with his sheer will and determination to train me to learn all of the processes and will always go out his way to go the extra mile help if any other staff member requires help, this incudes staying late and helping with any enquiries. I’d like to take this time to thank him for everything he does for the team and myself personally, it’s well deserved.”

“He is a true leader and I can see him going very far with this company and he is a pleasure to work with, he is a credit to this company.”

Keep up the great work, Jack!

Social Committee

• Thank you to everyone that took part in our dress down day on Thursday 22 June. I am delighted to say that we raised £105 from this and added another £105 from the social fund to make a grand total of £210 that we donated to Chailey Heritage. This is their letter of thanks:

Dear Helen

How lovely to hear from you and to learn that you and your staff have been continuing to fundraise for us – this is brilliant, thank you very much.

Please pass on our grateful thanks to all involved – your support is invaluable.

  Best wishes

Joan MartinFundraising OfficerChailey Heritage Foundation

• Although St Peter & St James were our charity of the year for 2016, last month Lee Simmons assisted the charity in a fund raising project. In a joint venture with Lightning Packaging, ILG have sent out a number of shipments to various celebrities in the UK and provided return labels, so that they can send something back, which will be auctioned online to raise money. Once the bidding has ended, ILG will then be responsible for repacking the items that have been won and distributing them to the winning bidders, with all proceeds going to the St Peter and St James Hospice. Great work Lee and I look forward to further updates on this project as it develops.

A quick update from Dan Sawyer on his Race to the King 54 mile Ultra

‘We Started at 8 am and ran for 53 miles up and down some of the biggest hills in England a total elevation 6958 meters, this was by far the hardest thing I have ever challenged myself to do we ran through heavy rain and winds at the start and ended up warm and sunny by around 2pm.

I managed to complete the race in just over 11.5 hours, I think all the running done something to my head because at the end I signed up to do it again next year lol.’

Upcoming events

Please put the 10 February 2018 in your diary, this is the date for the ILG Annual Awards, details will follow nearer the time and I am led to believe that we have a brand new venue.

June Bonus

We had a record breaking month in terms of GP, the SLH Bulk send making a very nice contribution to this and five new fulfilment customers starting in the month. Labour costs are still in excess of our target but they are gradually getting back on track and, the number of new starters joining our payroll, rather than being employed through an agency, will contribute to this. This month has seen some savings with central overheads but this is likely to reverse out later in the financial year as marketing campaigns and IT developments are delivered. All in all, a good month and I am pleased to say we are still on track to achieve our target for this financial year.

1 20.00%

20.00%40.00%60.00%80.00%

100.00%120.00%140.00%160.00%

138.17%

100.00%

June Bonus Result

Series1

December

January

FebruaryMarch April May

JuneJuly

August

September

October

November

0.00%

20.00%

40.00%

60.00%

80.00%

100.00%

120.00%

8.70%14.25%

18.84%25.29%

31.03%37.20%

44.70%52.14%

59.32%

73.57%

85.93%

100.00%

11.11%19.03%

23.11%29.57% 33.32%

39.40%

49.76% 49.76% 49.76% 49.76% 49.76% 49.76%

YTD Bonus Target

Target YTDAchieved YTD

Ask Me Anything

Question

Hello Mike

Sorry to bombard you with these but I am trying to write them as and when I think of them

I had two identical orders I needed to send back out for Aim so I completed two new orders from scratch.

Do you think there could be an option to be able to duplicate an order for these situations – either in .net or Metafour?

I am thinking more the delivery address (this we can already do), contact details and Product details. I still think it is important we have to select shipping method as this can change.

Would avoid errors when loading a new order. Improve efficiency within customer services. Could really help when you need to be quick because it is right at the end of the day – this was me

yesterday

Answer

After investigation by Ryan there is no simple solution to the question you pose below. Ryan agreed though that it is a time consuming process, so can I ask you to bring this topic up with your colleagues at your next team meeting and ask for one week’s-worth of assessment to give some visibility to the problem, roughly how many times is it happening per day across all contracts.

Once I know this I can gage the time it is costing the company and whether it worth adding to our list of developments for 2018.

Would you come back to me on this?

Thanks again Dave and apologies it has taken me a few weeks to respond to this but it was important to get it looked at before coming back to you.

Core Objective 2: Retention and Growth of our Existing Clients

• In Fulfilment, in July we have conducted a significant number of client reviews to support our objectives of client retention and growth from existing clients. On the whole these have been extremely positive and we have taken some very forward thinking actions away from these reviews. Of the many visits we have had in July, the more notable customers include SLH, WickHill, Yoga Rebel, Sophia Webster and Eco Water. Prior to July, a number of our customers were experiencing further issues with UK carriage which prompted us to revisit the current offering. As a result of this we have been able to now further expand our services on UK carriage to include DPD which a large number of our customers expressed a big interest in. Charlotte Tilbury have fully transitioned to DPD for all UK carriage outside of their Royal Mail rate and Sophia Webster are soon to transfer from UPS which comes with a significant cost saving. We have had a successful transition with our UK Sameday offering with City Sprint and we are delighted to offer our customers market leading technology and user experience.

• We will be shortly introducing a CRM ticketing system which could transform our customer service offering and further enhance the services we can offer to our customers. We are utilising the same platform as our IT ticketing system, go to assist, which will further improve our visibility, productivity and efficiency. In addition to this, we have recognised the need for administration support within the team and are actively recruiting to fill these roles. We have a strong record of recruiting internally and if you want a career in Customer Services, we would strongly encourage you to apply for these roles that are advertised.

• Project Moonshot

• We have lots to tell you about with the Moonshot project, as during the course of the last few weeks we have made some significant strides and rolled out some of the technology at other sites. The Burgess Hill site became the second warehouse to switch over to the PDA setup. I am pleased to report that we successfully migrated 4 accounts over to the PDA systems, which included Yoga Rebel, Stream Z, Meli Melo and Fabio Giovanni and already shipped over 250 orders in the first few days. Already (even in its infancy), feedback has been excellent and some of our staff are seeing some time saving benefits. Some direct feedback includes, ‘particularly on Yoga Rebel the picking process is actually saving time, is more accurate and saves loads of paper’ so we are really pleased with the initial results. Our next step is working with other sites to ensure the locations are setup ready to work with the PDAs, and then we can go on to introduce the units as we identify ready-to-go clients.

• In other news, we have introduced the new return and replace functions to the Birches facility with Sophia Webster going live last month. Other Birches accounts will be going live over the course of the next month. This process provides a more accurate way of recording returns, saves time, and ultimately

moves us away from google docs and managing many spreadsheets. Eventually all client returns will work this way and we are working through a list to move these over the course of the next couple months.

• Over the course of last month we also completed a project that saw us digitally weigh and scan Charlotte Tilbury items, so we can hold all of the information against the product within .NET. In time, this will provide the capability to automatically calculate weight and dimension information when shipping, which will help save time and provide a much more accurate setup to work with. This is something we have added to the Moonshot project since it launched this year.

• Finally, the last part of the development for PO receipting and put away has been completed and released in a test environment. We expect this feature to become live with the next version update in the next week or so and rolled out across to those clients with high goods in demands first, and then throughout.

DRIVE

• We are very pleased to report that we have had a record breaking month with an amazing 179 breakdowns logged, taking our yearly total up to an impressive 784!

• It has been really great to see an increase in logs across a variety of departments. Fulfilment Customer Services logged the highest amount of breakdowns with 47%, followed by Burgess Hill Warehouse Operations with 25%. This is a huge improvement from Burgess Hill who have raised 32 more logs than the previous month. There were also big improvements for Gatwick units, raising 21 breakdowns, compared to 9 the month previous. A huge thank you to everyone that took the time utilise Drive this month, this has been a huge help for us in identifying a total of 9 new processes with an average breakdown repair time of 3.5 days.

• It has also been really great to see a large number of logs raised that are not directly related to customer offences. For example, 26 of the 28 breakdowns logged for Tiffen, related directly to address errors on orders. All were promptly passed on to the customer and they were able to use the feedback to identify a training issue. This will now save the warehouse a lot of time moving forward.

• Unfortunately, we have had the highest amount of miss-picks logged this month for barcoded items, with a total reported cost to the company of £378.38. We have already identified a number of potential solutions for this, including the removal of non-barcoded shipping options which is now very near to completion.

• Finally. we will be sending round a very brief survey to everyone in the early stages of August, it would be great to have as many responses as possible. We are very keen to identify what restrictions each department faces when logging breakdowns, as well as any additional benefits you would like to see from the Drive platform.

• Once again, a huge thank you to everyone who has helped with a record breaking month for Drive.

Core Objective 3: Growth through new business sales

Fulfilment sales

• In July, as well as Jaded London starting trading with ILG, as mentioned last month, we have also seen the introduction of Olivier Baby http://www.olivierbaby.com/ which as the name suggests, is a lovely high end baby clothing brand whose followers include the Royal Family as both Princess Charlotte and Prince George have both been photographed wearing their clothing.

• Unfortunately due to some unforeseen circumstances there are a few accounts that have seen their start dates moved back until August and September; but to give you some idea of what we have come soon we will be working with Homebody London http://homebody.co.uk/ who sell luxury loungewear, Paolita, whose swimwear can be found in some of the big fashion companies such as Matches Fashion http://www.matchesfashion.com/womens/designers/paolita and finally, Paper London http://www.paperlondon.com/ who sell high end clothing.

Marketing

The ILG website continues to be very busy with a new highest level of visitors and sessions in June. Just under 15,000 people visited our website and we experienced almost 86,000 sessions on the site during the month. These continued high levels on the website are also generating very high levels of inbound enquiries both via the website contact forms and telephone calls again this month.

The beauty campaign has been running this month and is leaving a very positive impression of ILG. One potential customer who would not normally take calls from new suppliers agreed to our call and commented “it was very well constructed and certainly got our attention”. The campaign will pause now for August and resume again in September.

With the imminent launch of Net Courier, we have begun communicating about this to our current customer base. The first email has been sent and will be followed up in the next couple of weeks with another email and customer visits.

Controlling our costs

Balers

We took delivery of the baler in Burgess Hill last month and I am pleased to say that we are now producing around 2-3 bales per week, this has meant that we are now able to remove one recycling collection from Biffa which is saving £38 a week. We now have cardboard balers at all of our sites with the exception of unit 25 and these are producing on average 2 bales each week, each bale is approx. 500kgs so as a company we are now producing in the region of 5 tons of cardboard a week that is sold for recycling instead of going in the Biffa bin. Each ton that we sell for recycling earns us £20. Well done Helen and all the team that contribute to our policy to recycle cardboard using the Balers.

Thank you to everyone who attended the Roadshows. I hope that you enjoyed it, I certainly did and enjoyed meeting those of you that are new to ILG. For those that were unable to attend we did record the final session and we just have a few tweaks to make to that and we will circulate to the managers to arrange some group viewings. Thanks again for all you do.

Mike