The phone call that had no good answer
Dean Whitlock still remembers the call. Nine depots had missed trunk departures that Monday, two of them badly enough to break a service commitment with one of Ridgeway Distribution's largest industrial clients. He had to explain, in real time, why the client's parts hadn't moved.
I had a bad answer dressed up as a good one. I remember coming off that call thinking, I cannot keep running a sixty-depot network on instinct and goodwill and a Wednesday report.
Ridgeway runs 60 depots across the UK, moving several hundred thousand parcels and a heavy volume of palletised freight a day, next-day, for retail and industrial clients whose rhythms barely resemble each other. As network operations director, Dean is accountable for service, cost, and staffing across all of it, three things that in distribution are, in his words, completely tangled together.
A network that only looked backwards
Before that December, every depot manager built their own shift plan their own way. Some had it down to an art; others were, as Dean puts it, winging it. Head office saw none of it live, only a report on Wednesday describing what had already gone wrong on Monday.
The result was a strange, expensive kind of blindness. Bristol would be short on trunk drivers while Cardiff, forty minutes away, had staff standing idle after nervous over-booking the week before. Agency labour had crept to 18% of the depot wage bill, much of it last-minute premium cover booked hours before a shift, at the highest rate for the lowest certainty of quality.
We were being ambushed by the known, because we weren't using what we already had. We had the data sitting in our systems and no way to turn it into a staffing plan a depot manager could act on by Thursday for the following week.
Choosing a windscreen over a mirror
Dean went looking for something that planned rather than merely recorded. Most of what he saw, he says, was a better rear-view mirror; he wanted a windscreen. Northpeak Crew built a suggested shift plan from Ridgeway's own demand forecast, depot by depot, matching people to the skills and licences each role actually needs. Northpeak Pulse then put the whole estate on one screen at head office, and Northpeak Onsite carried the live plan onto drivers' and warehouse staff's phones.
Within weeks, Pulse was flagging imbalances nobody had ever been able to see in advance: Bristol three short on Thursday, Cardiff four over the same day. A quiet Tuesday nudge moved two people and closed both gaps, no agency, no premium, no missed departure.
Rollout ran region by region over about ten weeks, starting with the more willing managers and letting their results do the persuading. One 20-year veteran in the North West, sceptical at first, pulled Dean aside six weeks in.
This thing gave me my Sunday nights back. For twenty years I built the next week's rota at my kitchen table on a Sunday evening. Now it's drafted before I sit down, and I spend ten minutes on it after my Monday coffee.
What actually moved
Inside a single quarter, agency labour fell from 18% of the depot wage bill to under 11%, driven almost entirely by the disappearance of panic bookings; on Ridgeway's volumes, that is well over £1 million a year. On-time trunk departures rose from the low nineties to 99%, the metric Dean says flows downstream into every other measure of service. Planned overtime dropped too, a shift he hadn't predicted; managers had long padded rotas defensively against gaps they couldn't see coming, and once the forecast could be trusted, that habit relaxed across the network.
Last December, Ridgeway onboarded two new contracts mid-peak, historically a reckless move, and absorbed the volume without adding a single extra head-office planner.
That, for me, is the real prize, and it's bigger than the cost number. We've gone from being the function that says be careful to the function that says yes, we can take that on.
Looking beyond the fog
Dean spends his time differently now, less firefighting, more looking at trends across regions in Pulse and asking why one consistently beats another on labour cost per parcel. Ridgeway is planning further growth, including possible acquisitions, and Dean now sees added complexity as manageable rather than something the team absorbs by working harder.
Get the whole network onto one view first, before you do anything clever. Most of the waste was never a decision anybody made on purpose. It was just the fog.
Ridgeway Distribution is a national parcel and pallet distribution business operating 60 depots across the UK, moving next-day freight for retail and industrial clients.