Welcome to the March 1st edition of Warehouse & Logistics News. As the facts emerged about the recent KFC chicken crisis, which left fast food outlets closed across the country and made national news headlines, it turns out that the problem stemmed from KFC switching distribution partners from Bidfood to DHL and going from six regional warehouses to just one distribution centre.

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According to industry experts, it is possible for a large fast food operation with hundreds of outlets, to serve the needs of individual branches from a single hub. However, in order to do so, everything must be properly aligned, with everyone involved working closely together to put the processes in place and ensure all the ensuing logistics and IT issues are resolved. Sadly this didn’t happen in the case of KFC, with the inevitable results we are now familiar with.

In other news, while our government plods on with the Brexit negotiations, British businesses and overseas-owned businesses based here continue to focus on serving customers in Europe from the UK. On our front cover Pregis, the USowned packaging giant has begun trading in Europe from its Hertfordshire headquarters. Pregis’ solutions include the leading environmentally friendly packaging brand, Easypack, which has been produced here for over 25 years and has won numerous awards for packaging innovation.

There’s more packaging news in our Packaging feature in this issue. We hear from Kite Packaging about their extended box and postal range, available from their online e-commerce platform; Goplasticpallets, who helped Menzies newstrade distribution save space in their storage area; and CHEP pooled pallerts, who have signed a deal to supply potato producer Albert Bartlett with 350,000 standard pallets and 10,000 Euro pallets per year, giving significant environmental savings compared with white wood pallets.

As the second story on our front cover reminds us, in today’s flat-out business environment, clear work area delineation plays a key role in workplace safety. The challenge is that calling in outside contractors often means down time and lost revenue, especially in busy periods. With an estimated 73% of warehouses doing their own internal line marking and surface maintenance, Meon’s LineLazer line marking machines and water-based floor surface marking products are ideal for in house facilities teams to use.

And finally, let’s have a big hand of applause for Patrick Mulhall, MD of PALLITE, who successfully raised £1,130 for the Northampton Hope Centre by taking part in their Big Sleep Out at the end of January to raise awareness of homelessness. You can still sponsor Patrick via his JustGiving page. Patrick now plans to create a PALLITE community shelter to encourage more people to take part next time. We wish him well.

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