Mike S Monthly Message 64 April 2017

DRIVING COMMUNICATION Mike’s Monthly Message 64 – April 2017 Core Objective 1 – Retention of staff  Apologies for the list of new starters in this month’s message but you can see from the number below this is a record month for people joining the permanent workforce at ILG. So for all those who joined us in April, I hope that you are settling in and, if I have not met you already, I look forward to meeting you soon.

o Tracy Meaden – Warehouse Assistant at Burgess Hill – 4 April

o Balazs Ujvari – Goods in/Stock Control Manager at Gatwick Gate – 10 April

o Lee Mead – Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 2 – from casual 10 April

o Liam Webb – Warehouse Assistant at Gatwick Gate – 3 April

o Stuart Delves - Delivery/Fulfilment Customer Service Rep Burgess Hill – 10 April

o John Nyaga – Driver at Gatwick Unit 25 – 10 April

o Musa Suwaneh – Warehouse Assistant at Sterling Park Unit 2 – 18 April

o Jason Morris – Warehouse Assistant at East Grinstead – 24 April

o Bianca Scutaru – Warehouse Assistant at East Grinstead – 24 April

o Joanna Briam – Warehouse Assistant at East Grinstead – 24 April

o Corina Ivascu – Warehouse Assistant at SP2 – 24th April

o Amy Woodcock joined 30 April as Finance Support Rep at Burgess Hill

o Alex Bar joined 27 March as Warehouse Assistant at SP 2

 And in May we will welcome:

o Dan Burgess – Customer Service Account Executive @ EG – 2 May

o William Peach – Warehouse Assistant at Burgess Hill – 2 May

o Jon Mason – Finance Support Rep at Burgess Hill – 2 May

o Johnny Pentecost – Warehouse Assistant at SP7 – 2 May

o Jamal Sagnia – Cleaner at EG – 2 May

o Irena Vesilnova – Warehouse Assistant at SP2 – 2 May

o Dragos Balan – Warehouse Assistant at SP2 – 8 May

o Nicoleta Musak – Warehouse Assistant at SP2 – 8 May

I hope you all have a long and rewarding career with ILG. Sadly we have some leavers to tell you about this month too  In Sterling Park 2, Amanda Hardman, Tvetelin Nedelchev, Andreea Ilie and Nicolae Stanca. Peter Brown one of our Drivers also left us this month. We wish you all the best for the future.

 We also wish Ilona Kowalcyzyk all the best as she leaves us on maternity leave. Take care of yourself Ilona and keep in touch.

 A few changes to keep you up to date with. The Fulfilment customer services team has now moved to Logistics House, East Grinstead. Alex Saunders has taken on his new role as Process Improvement Manager and we welcome Alex North back from maternity leave. I also told you last month that Charlie Morris was leaving us on 4 May. I am pleased to let you know that this has now been delayed until mid-June as she has agreed to stay and help with the training of all the new recruits to that team. Thanks Charlie, this is much appreciated. Finally, Suzie Simms took over the management of the Burgess Hill warehouse in April, good luck Suzie and I look forward to seeing your career blossom in our Fulfilment division.

 Well done to Peter Taylor, Hannah Chaffe and Dipali Patel who have completed the IOSH Working Safely course and have been awarded their certificates.

 ILG entered a team of 6 swimmers in a Swimathon on Good Friday at the Dolphin Leisure Centre, Haywards Heath. They swan 139 lengths in 55 minutes raising £310 for our Charity of the Year, ILG doubled this and also sponsored the event making the total amount donated £1,120. Well done to the team - Suzie Simms (Team Captain), Emily Downer, James Godsell, Dan Sawyer, Matt Blackmore, Steve Cramb and Jane Middlemiss.

 We have now recruited 2 H&S Reps for our new site at East Grinstead and they are Jason Morris and Kerri Comber. We also need another H&S Rep for unit 2 Sterling Park and if this is something that you would like to do please speak to Helen Nichols or Jason Talman. Below is a list of the H&S Reps at our other sites. Please could you ensure that you raise any concerns that you may have about H&S with them. o Keith Tantrum – Burgess Hill o Mark Cooper – Burgess Hill o Craig Boxall – Unit 25 and the drivers o Hannah Chaffe- Gatwick o Darren Miles- Gatwick o Viktoria Orgovan – Unit 7 Sterling Park o Jason Talman – Unit 2 Sterling Park

 Please keep using the H&S Drive Log, this really does help maintain a safe working environment for us all. For example, Steve Cramb reported that when the landlord’s contractor had replaced the perimeter fence the fire exit route was very uneven and dangerous as they had up lifted some of the paving slabs. Without Steve raising this and us having the opportunity to repair the path, we would not have had a safe escape route had we needed to evacuate the building.

 I thought that you would be interested to see the analysis of accidents over the last two years. Investigating each accident, understanding our risks and managing those appropriately is key to ensuring we maintain a safe working environment. The number of accidents increased last year but the number employed also increased meaning that the number of accidents per employee remained fairly consistent at 0.196 in 2016 compared to 0.179 in 2015. We would of course like to reduce this number and so we will be monitoring this closely in future at the quarterly H&S committee. You will see below an increase in manual handling accidents which is, of course, a concern. Helen Nichols, our H&S Manager will be delivering classroom style refresher manual handing training for all our warehouse staff and drivers during June.

 We have also broken down where are accidents occur to see if there are any inconsistencies that need further investigation. Please remember that it is important to report all accidents no matter how minor so we can investigate and put in place measures to prevent recurrence.

 Finally, on Health & Safety, we have some fire warden training taking place in Gatwick in May for all of our current fire wardens. We are looking for some additional Fire Wardens at Sterling Park 7 so if this is something that you would be interested please do speak to Viktoria or Helen for more details  The Social Committee are due to meet in the coming weeks to discuss future social events as well as fund raising ideas for our Charity of the Year, Chailey Heritage. Please do let your rep know if you have any ideas that you would like to put forward for the committee to consider. The reps per site are listed below: o Jake North – Gatwick o Tom Sumpter and Sarah Mitchell Voice – East Grinstead o Chloe Sawyers and Maxine Punter – Burgess Hill o Steve Cramb - Sterling Park  As I said in my recent email to you all, we would like to develop our warehouse apprenticeship scheme over the course of the next 12 months and, to this end, we have moved to a new provider Campus Training. We will be working with them over the next few months to recruit some new apprentices for all of our sites. If you know of anyone who might be leaving school or college and is interested in an apprenticeship please ask them to take a look at the apprenticeship page on our website and apply. https://www.ilguk.com/about-us/join-team/apprenticeships if they mention your name you will be eligible for the £300 recruitment bonus.

 We considered 28 nominations in total for SMOM in March with 18 people being included. They are Liam Ingram, Musa Kassama, Kina Angelova, Mark Williams, Jake North, Rebecca Sheppard, Dan Putland, James Evans, Warren Hunt, Darren Bowen, Rhys Kirby, Ben Hunt, Alex Saunders, Emily Downer, Maciej Jankun, Steve Ettridge, Viktoria Orgovan and Mandy Peters.

 So, in third place receiving £50 is Maciej Jankun. Maciej was nominated for stepping up and organising the teams when Contract Coordinators were away. He has motivated the team, worked extra hours without complaint and trained new staff. Maciej has also been re organising Malin+Goetz to make it easier and quicker to pick, improving processes. “ He has been training the new staff and working long hours and keeping every one motivated, without him things could have gone very badly.” Great work, Maciej.

 In second place receiving £100 is Warren Hunt: Warren was nominated for being reliable, always putting in extra effort and making sure the customer is happy without fail. Warren picks up new information with ease as well as having great knowledge of Posturite. He always uses his initiative and goes the extra mile.

‘I feel the work rate he puts into Posturite is very good and his knowledge of the contract is next to none. Always puts in the extra effort and I feel we are lucky to have him’

Well done, Warren.

 Finally, our winner for this month, receiving £250 is Kina Angelova.

Kina received a number of votes for consistently stepping up and taking on responsibilities outside of her day to day role in order to ensure the smooth running of the contract. She does this regularly both in the absence of the Contract Co-ordinator and also to assist Sarah when that is required. Kina gets involved in the daily meetings, helps train new staff and consistently goes above and beyond. This has been recognised by her colleagues, praising her exceptional work and abilities. Congratulations Kina.

March Bonus  Before I show you the graphs I need to draw your attention to customers we are losing or that are under threat of losing. Since the referendum some of our customers have faced real challenges particularly with ever fluctuating currency exchange rates making their businesses harder. This has caused a number of clients to have to review the affordability of outsourcing. Others have simply not gone to plan and they have had to cease trading, but there are also clients leaving ILG because they feel our relationship is poor and our service not good enough. This has never happened before but our losses to date along with clients at risk totals 12 clients and it is down to the simplest of things such as not scanning items, mis picks, mis-labelling and not following up and closing out queries. We cannot influence nor control everything but we can ensure we follow our processes for every order, every day, we can provide fantastic customer service with amazing follow up, issue resolve and close off. Our new business is just superb, our client growth is superb but ultimately if these two things do not exceed the business we lose then jobs will be lost. This is a very serious part of this message so please act on it now to prevent this becoming a problem, every single order counts!!!

 March saw another high performing month yielding the third highest GP in ILG history. Whilst we are ahead of our target by the end of March, our net profit margin has taken a hammering in the first 4 months at 3.3% less than the same period last year. This is due predominantly to increased labour costs and to the cost of running the East Grinstead facility with low level GP contribution. We have been paying rent, rates and utilities since 13th January and recruited labour one / two months in advance of opening with very little GP contribution to show for that. However, I am pleased that we have just achieved our target in March which has enabled us to pay bonus. The next few months will be tough whilst we continue to implement new customers into the East Grinstead site so please do all you can to control our costs.

 In your April salary, as well as bonus, the vast majority of you will also have received a pay increase. I am very pleased that we are able to give you a salary review that is costing 3.34% of our wage bill, including just short of £50,000 which is being awarded in increments to reflect progression and experience. We will in December this year be reviewing salaries again for those that we consider need to move up a pay grade. I hope this reinforces the value we place on a committed high performing team and how much we want you to stay and enjoy a long and rewarding career with ILG. Ask Me Anything  Unfortunately my request to ‘what ruins my day’ with suggestions as to what we could do to make a meaningful difference has fallen on deaf ears and so the prize money of £1,000 has no home. I will be quite frank with you and say that I am disappointed that out of 185 permanent staff no one could come up with something that we can do to that will make a meaningful difference to the business. I am convinced that there is lots we can do and you have the answers because you are at the forefront of our operation. Please pass your thoughts on why we did not get a better take up to this initiative to your Staff Representative and we can discuss at the next Ask Me Anything Plus meeting. Core Objective 2: Retention and Growth of our Existing Clients Project Moonshot  Over the last few weeks we have been making the final steps to move a number of accounts at each site over to the new Returns process we reported on previously. We have been in contact with Charlotte Tilbury, Avalon Fashions, Yoga Rebel, Sophia Webster and of course Self- Portrait who have been on the live trial. These customers are all now in the final stages of the setup prior to the roll out the new Return and Replace procedure over the next couple of weeks. We recognize that these customers have quite a significant amount of returns and by moving across this eliminates google docs and other supporting spreadsheets which will help save lots of time. As soon as this wave of customers is up and running we will be targeting other customers to move over until eventually all are using the new setup.

 In other areas, following feedback from you, we have been looking at developing a smaller barcode label and free text option which will help with smaller items that need a barcode or other labels we need to produce for non 3ex. NET customers. This, we hope, will completely remove the need to have any DYMO labels at all, which will help to save more time and money. We expect further news over the next few days with this development.

 Finally, I am pleased to report that Baby Mori will be the first account that we move across to PDA picking. Following successful testing, we are looking to go live by end of April. Upon successful completion we will then target the other customers we intend to move over to PDA picking and a timetable to do this. DRIVE  With all 2016 Drive logs now closed off, we have been in a position to focus our attention analysing breakdowns between January and March of this year. Within this period, there was a total of 298 Drive Logs. This graphic indicates who is raising logs by department

 We were then able to identify the customers who were subject to the most breakdowns, so we can drill into the detail a With one dedicated department looking at all DRIVE logs, it has enabled us to identify some key areas of improvement across the whole business as opposed to a single department. We have an opportunity to streamline procedures and align processes across the business which we think will serve us all better in the future. It is solely due to the Drive logs raised over the past number of months that we have been able to identify some exciting changes across the business – So thank you all! Examples of some fixes we hope to be implementing very soon include: New cage labelling system being rolled out across all warehouses + Brand consistency for customers visiting multiple sites + Transferable process for individuals working across multiple sites + Clearer labelling should reduce number of items placed in incorrect cage

Removal of non-barcoded shipping from log-ins that no longer require it + Barcoded products must be scanned and cannot be bypassed, ultimately increasing pick accuracy. This will mean if the contract is barcoded, there is no other way to process the order apart from scanning it through as it should be.

 DRIVE Development Now that we seem to have identified an effective solution to the management of DRIVE with the focus of Alex Saunders as Process Improvement Manager and dedicated Mechanic, we need to turn our attention to DRIVE Development. We recently advertised internally for a Warehouse Trainer without success and so, we would like to trail an alternative solution. We would like to appoint a Warehouse Trainer at each site who will spend half their working week with responsibility for the delivery and administration of training for their colleagues and new starters. This post will be advertised early next week and will attract a £1,000 per annum salary enhancement. This is a great experience for anyone who aspires to a future role in warehouse management and I encourage you to apply. Core Objective 3: Growth through new business sales New Business Sales  It has been another exciting month in Sales with the culmination of months of effort coming to fruition in new accounts moving through implementation ready for go live. In Fulfilment this month we have Trade Supply ready for go live in May, they are the largest ink and cartridge seller in Ireland now moving in to U.K. market and will be placed in Gatwick. In addition, we have Oh Hey Girl Store, a very unique women's fashion brand which launched around 6 months ago and has already been very successful. Next there are two new starters from the USA, one of them is a company called Monq, who make homeopathic and aromatherapy vape type cigarettes these are already a huge business in the US with a significant International portfolio who want us to facilitate for the UK and European markets. The other a company called Hurricane Media, again an extremely well established subscription box business in the USA who are looking to launch in the UK and Europe. Both US companies have huge marketing budgets so we have high hopes for these guys. After 14 months of negotiation we will welcome a 100% UK business manufacturing in Reading called Aroma Works, a 100% UK manufactured luxury designer garment business called Roland Mouret and last but not least a luxury home furnishings business called Buster & Punch.

In Delivery we have two new starters in Lambton Clothing - a suit manufacturer based in Leeds, initially a UK Mail Profile account and planning now for moving on next to a UPS profile and also the Linc Group, based in Colchester, who also have both UPS and UK Mail Profile which started yesterday these are potentially up to 150 + jobs per day. We are also pleased to advise that Denny's have now completed a successful trial and are now giving us all of their UK and international volume beginning early May once the IT integration is completed.

 Marketing Many thanks to everyone who helped out with the photoshoot in March. We got approx. 100 new photos for use on our website and in marketing materials which is extremely useful. Here are just a few to give you a taster!  New Case Study: Ark Skincare have signed off a new case study for us which is particularly beneficial as we begin a marketing campaign targeting beauty companies in May. We are awaiting final sign off on three more new case studies, all of which are from our beauty clients.

Core Objective 4: Controlling our Costs  Well done to project moonshot that has implemented a centralised stock of labels that are now booked in to ILG stock for internal ordering. We have also sourced one supplier to purchase the majority of labels which has resulted in us securing a price of £4.69 per 1500 labels compared to the DYMO comparison of £3.24 per 220 labels.

 Well done also to Process Improvement brought about through DRIVE, the two keys areas for improvement have cost the company over £800.00 in quarter 1 of 2017, the process changes put in place should rid of these problems and reduce our costs by circa £2400.00 per annum.

So to keep this to 10 pages I will sign off briefly. Well done everyone, great month, but stick to processes, do not do anything you are not trained to do. Every single order counts! Enjoy a well deserved long weekend. Mike