Geodis UK wants to roll out its retiming of deliveries to evening time after a successful year of doing so with a major client.

Kevin Huskie, sales director at Geodis UK, told delegates how the company had worked with a fashion retailer to move deliveries to 38 of its stores, most of which are in city centres, out of daytime hours over the course of the year.

This, he said, had been “very successful” and something Geodis plans to do more of.

He said: “The benefits are clear to the customer, and our goal is to try and move daily deliveries for other retailers. We have 70 depots all over the UK working during the day, and we want to move some of that into the evenings.

“That’s our challenge, now that we’ve seen that it can work.”

Huskie also outlined some of the challenges that operators were up against when delivering at night.

These included having to use two-man crews because there’s no one in the stores to help unload deliveries, having to work with local police who tried to move the vehicles on, and even simple obstacles such as acquiring keys for the store and finding light switches once inside.

Another problem at night, he added, was looking out for pedestrians that were “less sober than they would be during the day”.

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