Towards ever higher standards
October 01st 2005 One of the principal objectives of the United Kingdom Warehousing Association (UKWA) - the trade organisation representing the country’s third party logistics sector - has been to establish the highest professional standards from its membership. In this article, Roger Williams, UKWA’s Director General (pictured below), discusses the role of the Association, its on-going quest for best practice in the 3PL sector and some of the major issues currently facing providers of warehousing and distribution services.
Ever since the formation of UKWA over 60 years ago, the third party warehousing and distribution sector has promoted best practice, retained its inherent flexibility and made the necessary technological advances to meet today’s increasingly complex logistical requirements.
From providing a basic service to Government back in 1944, the modern third party sector has played an increasingly important role within the wider freight logistics industry which today is reckoned to be the fifth largest in the UK economy, employing 1.7 million people in over 63,000 companies and worth Ł54,337 million per annum
Third party logistics - the business of contracting out a company's materials handling, warehousing and distribution activities - is an area of rapid growth across the globe. The efficient movement of goods along the supply chain has become one of the major factors determining who will command the markets, both now and in the future. Recently, as part of the well-established 'core competency' theory of modern management thinking, there has been an accelerating trend for companies to outsource their non-core activities as management questions the waste of time and effort in doing something that can be done more efficiently and cost effectively by specialist organisations.
With UKWA representing around 80% of the UK’s third party sector - around 700 companies - the Association therefore has an important role to fulfil as summarised in its mission statement: "To protect the interests and represent the views of the third party logistics sector at a local, national and international level, and to promote best practice among the UKWA membership."
The quest for best practice
Those three key pillars of the Association’ strategy - to protect the interests of the third party sector, represent the views of the industry and promote best practice among the members - remain central to everything undertaken by UKWA. As a trade association, UKWA believes that best practice applies to every aspect of its members’ activities and involves keeping up-to-date with sector developments and measuring individual performance against market leaders. It also fully subscribes to the view that best practice begins with management through the communication of a clear mission and strategy, leadership by example, the setting of demanding but realistic targets, following an open and communicative management style, and clear and careful strategic planning. In practice, this is achieved by:
maintaining professional standards of UKWA entry with an annual review of warehousing and other initiatives to achieve national accreditation of the Association’s warehousing standards encouraging benchmarking and regular operational audits providing operational guidance through publications and seminars, particularly via UKWA’s award-winning journal Warehouse recognising professional achievement with the continued development of the Association’s annual Awards for Warehousing scheme that has met with industry-wide acclaim promoting individual and team development through the Association’s support and promotion of sector training schemes.
To maintain its standards, UKWA members - and their customers - know that an essential prerequisite for UKWA membership is the ability of the applicant company to demonstrate a high level of professional expertise to meet the exacting standards that the Association has determined to be the minimum acceptable. All new applicants are therefore inspected by a Council member to ensure they have high minimum standards in 11 important areas of warehousing, ranging across such aspects as the warehouse building itself to fire protection measures and from administration facilities to health and safety controls.
Up until now, a perceived shortcoming in UKWA’s inspection programme has been that there was no procedure in place to revisit members regularly to confirm that standards were being maintained.
With a clear and growing need for UK providers to be totally transparent about their own professional standards in an increasing competitive market, this situation has been now been rectified by the introduction of the UKWA annual audit (known as the AA). The AA marks a first step towards obligatory operational audits as a condition of UKWA membership. Initially, the scheme has been designed as a self-assessed audit with compliance acknowledged by the AA symbol - which highlights the year of the assessment - alongside individual companies’ details on the Association website and in the UKWA Directory. The great majority of UKWA’s 700 member companies have reacted enthusiastically to the scheme. Potential users looking for quality warehousing and a high standard of service, no matter how large or small their requirement, can therefore contact a UKWA member confident in the knowledge that that provider has both met and continues to maintain the Association’s standards.
Much work still lies ahead for the Association. Some of the challenges which lie ahead include: the continuing shortage of essential skills within the industry; dealing with the impact of consolidation within the 3PL sector as sizeable companies embark on fast expansion in order to compete on the national, European and global stages; growing levels of bureaucracy with issues such as the Working Time Directive, fuel taxation, transport regulations, employment and environmental legislation, Health & Safety Directives, Customs & Excise decrees, etc; assimilating new technological advances within the logistics sector; the debate on switching more freight to rail; and much more besides. With its solid foundations and far-sighted membership, UKWA faces all such challenges with energy, enthusiasm and the will to win. More articles from United Kingdom Warehouse Association: | 
