The United Pallet Network (UPN) has revealed further details about how its European service expansion, revealed early this week, will work in practice.
Speaking to Motortransport.co.uk, UPN commercial director Dave Brown, said the move to upgrade the network’s existing IT to provide instant pricing, quotes and online ordering for Europe via a new web portal, was in direct response to its membership’s wishes.
The new service, which includes auto postcode look-up, went live at the start of the month and is designed to boost sales as a consequence of making deliveries into Europe as straight-forward as possible.
To date, Signet International has met the network’s European freight requirements. However, it will now only handle international deliveries [beyond Europe], as well as its existing UK areas of Slough and parts of Reading.
In its place, four, at present unnamed, UPN members will now between them cover the 26 European countries UPN serves. The four have all joined the network in the past 18 months and have extensive “European expertise”.
Freight into Europe currently accounts for 1% of UPN’s total pallets volume, and it is hoped that the new focus will increase this to somewhere in the region of 3% to 5%.
Brown expects at least some of this to come from freight that is currently delivered by haulier members outside of UPN moving into the network. This he predicted will happen due to the structured service, set transit times and inherit price competitiveness of a pallet network the service confers. “There’s also the ease of it now,” said Brown.
