That Was the Weekend that Was

Author: Sheila Bounford

Keith Rogers picks the first book

Reading the first post on this blog, my colleague Sian in customer services was heard to comment "I thought this was supposed to be the short answer". So before we get onto the more complex tier of reasons for our move, here are some notes and pictures from the weekend.

This morning at about 9.30am the first book was picked from the new pick face in the 10 Thornbury Road warehouse. Entirely co-incidentally (but rather fittingly) the task was performed by Keith Rogers, who attended the opening ceremony of the original Plymouth distribution centre of MacDonald & Evans Publishing in June 1976.  That company is the great-grandparent of the company that is today NBNi, and Keith's wife, Sue was one of the company's first employees. Sue is still one of our Customer Services Supervisors.

We cleaned and we cleaned some more

Today's first pick is the culmination of an incredibly busy weekend with one team lead by Neil Talliss and Darren Glasper focusing on packing up the last orders in Estover Road, Duncan "Max" Maxwell and colleagues transporting stock over to Thornbury Road, and a third team, led by Karen Marley filling pick bins. Even Chip our CFO & MD spent much of the weekend manhandling boxes and queueing up stock ready to populate the pick face. And another team cleaned. Unpacking and shelving books creates a huge amount of waste shrinkwrap and cardboard: breaking this down and clearing it into skips was on its own a full time job. But you only get one chance to start in a clean warehouse - and we were determined to take it. Juliette was spotted on her hands and knees vacuuming under the new packing line at one point!

Stock location being scanned on putaway

Jane Cutler, our HR Manager, was also in all weekend, and when she wasn't busy being part of the cleaning crew she was ensuring everyone was fed and watered. She also set up the new staff rest area, which comes complete with some sofas, as well as fridges, kettles and microwaves. We're planning to install a small lending library in there too over the next few weeks.

The I.T. team were on hand testing that all of the daily routines work. Of course it is always the unexpected that catches you out, and at we were temporarily mystified as to why the scanning guns weren't working. It turned out the guns were confused about whether they were looking for the Estover Road network IP address, or the Thornbury Road IP address. The reason why this was an issue still isn't completely clear - but once Dave Eagle had worked his magic on them it was quickly resolved, and stock was put away into its new locations and the system updated in real time via the scanners.

As I type, the first packing is beginning to happen on the packing line. We are going "slow and steady" about what we release for pick at present, while we continue to ensure everything is running properly. The end of day sales figures should be fairly high because of the sheer volume we pushed through over the weekend, and the pace of normal pick, pack activities will accelerate rapidly over the next hours and days.  We're also finishing off an enormous multiple-pallet Amazon consignment in that was begun Estover Road and is now having the final stock picked and added in Thornbury Road.  Small orders and urgent small / web site orders are flowing out to customers too.

Perhaps this gives a sense of scale

Without having seen it for themselves, I think it is hard for many of our publisher clients to grasp the full scale of what we have built here. (We're really looking forward to inviting everyone down to take a look and for a bit of a party - so stand by for notification of the date for that.) I've been involved in the planning of this for over a year - and even though I am so closely acquainted with what we have been aiming at, I still get a "wow" moment when I see stock being taken down from the 8th tier of the hi-bay. And when I stand back from the pick face and see it being filled with stock all neatly laid out ready for picking - I have to confess - there's a tear in my eye!

So, there still remains a great deal of work to be done. We now have our main operation sited in the Thornbury Road warehouse, but there is still a lot of stock to be brought over, and this process will carry on for a few more weeks. We've moved a lot of the easy stuff. There are still many mixed pallets to come so the hard work is by no means finished. But today marks step change in our business and our service to our publishers and customers.

Thornbury Rd Parcel No 1 packed by Jarek Plamowski

I've named a few of our unsung heroes above. But there are lots more - like Jenny from order processing who spent the weekend doing warehouse work and is very glad to be back at her desk today. We have many members of staff who have worked a great deal of overtime in recent weeks - and in warehouses with concrete floors that is physically very demanding. They all deserve a "shout out". Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone at NBNi who has put in so much work to getting us to today - and who will be keeping it up while we complete the job over the next few weeks.

So WHY are we doing this? (1: The short answer)

If you are distributed by us or if you buy books from us in any quantity, you almost certainly know by now that NBNi is expanding into larger, more modern distribution premises in Plymouth this summer (the main switchover between locations takes place this coming weekend). Over the months we have been preparing for and running this project, many clients, customers and colleagues in the industry have been asking us: "If the future's digital, why are you taking more space?" It's a simple question with a simple short answer, and a not-quite-so-simple long one. Today I'm going to focus on the short answer (the longer one will follow in a separate post).  The key words are service, efficiency, turnaround times, customer expectations, quality control, communication, people.

We've been running our business from premises designed over thirty years ago when the book industry supply chain worked at a much slower pace than it does now. We’ve also more than doubled in size in the past six years, and we can’t continue in the same premises. When our old warehouse was built, just-in-time ordering was an unknown phrase; Amazon wasn't even a twinkle in Jeff Bezos' eye; customers were used to waiting for books to come into stock in their local bookstore, and most publishers thought of the "customer" as the buyer in the bookshop, library supplier, wholesaler - not the ultimate user or consumer of the book.

Everything's different now. Internet retailers have been the dominant force in changing the supply chain for some years, and more recently in the UK the centralisation of Waterstone’s has also engendered change. The Internet resellers have incredibly high expectations of both data and physical book supply, and each one works to a slightly different model with its own service needs and priorities. Amazon needs consignment supply, The Book Depository needs daily actual stock data, Boffin requires direct-to-consumer supply, to name but a few. In the meantime some of the difficulties Waterstone’s have experienced at the hub have driven us to invest in new technologies that enable us to ensure and prove accuracy of supply.

On top of all of that, far more specialist publishers are now engaged in direct-to-consumer activities, with email and web-based marketing campaigns replacing traditional direct mail. What’s certain is that whatever route the customer is ordering through, they now have far more choice, and wield far more power than 30 years ago. And that's not just choice of books - but choice of what to do with their time, period. If the book isn't available when they want it, there are plenty of other ways to engage with ideas and text on and offline. Our changed consumer culture demands a different level of responsiveness from those of us still engaged with supplying physical books to resellers and end users. And to provide that responsiveness, we need to be working from premises designed around the new paradigms of book supply, where we can communicate with each other and our clients and customers more effectively, and where we can work faster and more accurately.

Most of our clients still rely on print books as their primary source of revenue. And the best way in which we can support our publishers through the present turbulent and unsettling times is to ensure that the experience of obtaining those physical books is as simple, and enjoyable as possible for the customer. Whether they are a wholesaler, a librarian, an independent bookshop in a German or Italian university town, a consignment distributor in the Far East, or an individual ordering via a vendor or publisher web site - people need to like ordering from us.

It is with all this in mind that we are going through the pain of relocating 3.4 million units of stock; a pressurised process that hasn't always been smooth. With thousands of active isbns, some of which sell only a few units of stock a year combining the process of a move, with keeping everything available for order and continuing timely supply has been a huge challenge. And of course it is not just books that we are relocating; our staff are also moving over to the new premises. No-one has to move house as our new warehouse and offices are less than a mile from the old ones. But people will be working in a new environment. It's a much better-planned, safer work space. (For example the new picking face is completely separate from the hi-bay storage, so there will be far less interaction of people and fork lift trucks). On balance our teams are excited to be working for a company that is so obviously investing in expansion and the future at a time when much of the economic news is doom and gloom. But even good change causes disruption and we’ve all had to retain our senses of humour at times.

We're deeply grateful to all of our publisher clients and to all of our customers for the support and encouragement we've received during the course of the project. Our objective is to reward you for this support with faster service, greater efficiency, better communication, greater accuracy and above all to be a company that you want to work with and want to buy from, staffed by people you really enjoy communicating and working with.

Author: Sheila Bounford