“Bollore will ensure we become a part of SAAFINS to provide clients with a seamless process.“
Saafins
Bollore are one of the major logistics service providers in the world and have been able to ensure the majority of our global client base’s supply chains have remained intact. This is due to our ongoing, long term approach to forging true partnerships with all ancillary organisations including sea freight and airfreight carriers involved in the supply chain. We have multiple ongoing contracts covering every part of the globe to ensure we are in a position to offer our clients as many options possible. Because of our global buying power, we offer some of the most cost-effective solutions in today’s marketplace. However, we will never be the ‘cheapest’ as there is a very fine line between cost and service, and Bollore will never compromise on service levels. For many of our clients, we provide contract pricing, and depending on your needs, we would opt to negotiate either a 3, 6 or even a 12-month contract to ensure you can effectively control your shipping costs. This will obviously depend on your expected traffic volumes.
During the past year as the transport industry started to ‘collapse’ under the impact of the virus, Bollore made a commitment to all clients that they would be kept updated on developments which may affect them directly. We publish a market report on a weekly basis (latest copy attached) and also provide interim information in order to keep them ahead of their competition. For example, Bollore identified urgent airfreight shipments were being delayed by weeks at the start of 2020. We quickly introduced our own airfreight charter program and in the last 12 months have moved in excess of 720 charters globally. This has been extremely successful especially for PPE and now vaccine products. We also started to notice delays in carriers booking sea freight shipments in the summer and notified all our clients to start booking at least 4 weeks prior to goods becoming available instead of the usual 7-10 days. Many of our larger clients now provide a rolling 6 week forecast of all the shipping needs in order for us to pre book space. During this time, we also introduced our own block train services from Asia to further control the escalating crisis. Our assertive actions have much alleviated the issues the industry is facing.
Following the Chinese New Year, there will continue to be a strong increase in demand for containers and vessel space, carriers will probably start a further ‘blank sailing program to maintain the high cost of shipping for as long as they can. Bollore’s commitment to our customers ensures we will endeavor to always find a solution with the fastest possible handling and low additional costs. Rate increases or freight surcharges have been announced at very short notice, such as last year’s peak season surcharges or container imbalance surcharges. However, our contracts by and large avoided these in the first instance to allow our clients a period of adjustment. Carriers, unfortunately, will continue to use logistics providers and their customers as cash cows to increase their results during this Corona crisis.
The tense sea freight situation for imports is likely to continue well beyond Chinese New Year and Bollore have already taken steps to purchase our own equipment destined for key gateways around the world. This will provide our clients with the certainty of container availability during critical periods.
Once Saafins customers’ requirements are known, we will provide a solution together with a draft SOP for Saafins approval, which once jointly approved, will be the cornerstone for KPI monitoring and development of a mutual partnership between Bollore & Saafins. Whilst we have a sophisticated online management tool to track all orders, many of our clients still prefer to work with excel spreadsheets. The way in which we communicate will be entirely down to Saafins and their customers.
Fiorentino Izzo
Bollore Logistics
Strategic Sales Manager