Introduction continued - the merger with Exel and DHL Global Forwarding

Good morning All

So, to carry on from my last post about DHL Global Forwarding (DGF), the new company was now the largest freight forwarder in the world and although that was a pretty impressive sales line along with the DHL brand identity, customers have widely differing opinions on large organisations and how good they are at actually delivering what they promise - and whether they're able to be personal and attentive, particularly towards the small-medium sized customers.

Often, large corporate accounts or multi-national customers will have dedicated operational teams assigned to them to ensure that all of that client's very specific requirements and KPIs are  consistently met). The remaining customers are handled by the normal branch import and export operational teams, and the service they receive can vary widely, depending on the company culture, amount of resources in operations and also the IT and systems in place which the operational staff have at their disposal.
We went through the usual integration challenges in terms of differing cultures, staff sometimes leaving or people moving around within the company and my team had it's share of that. I did however manage to convince management that with a team of 13 people, we needed admin support and so we took someone on and this was a real help, as managing 13 people in itself was a challenge, never mind the paperwork/reports etc.

The UK team was highly regarded as I'd already designed a Selling Guide in 2002 (the UK-USA Selling Guide) which we'd evolved to cover all lanes in the UK team and won recognition for this from our HQ in Basel it was then rolled out across the entire Trade Lane network globally. The reason I did this was because it was our job to develop business across the country pairs (say UK-Singapore) however when sales people in foreign countries had opportunities and needed to offer rates and services, there was no clear go to or authority on rates and services so we loaded the Selling Guides with market leading rates and full info on our air and LCL services, this meant no matter who had an opportunity, they could confidently sell the UK and stand a far better chance of winning the business.

I used to attend regional Trade Lane summits each year along with my respective Trade Lane Managers with the three other DHL regions (North America/Latin America, Asia-Pacific and Emerging Markets (Africa and Middle East). This was where we set our annual budgets and came up with initiatives to drive the growth of the lanes.

I'll add more next week.