Mark Bedeman, the newly appointed Bisham Consulting Director for Mainland Europe, tested this “hypothesis” with a question to the panel at 7^th Eyefortransport conference in Brussels in November. The panel and audience, of around 130 shippers, 60 logistics providers, and around 90 service companies, seemed to fully agree!

As the economies pull out of recession across Europe, Mark stressed the need for operations focus and most importantly consistent operations excellence. Many of the audience during conversations over the intensive two program confirmed that they were reviewing “Best Practice” across their business and were targeting to bring the least effective operations up to standard!

Mark has over thirty five years logistics and supply chain experience, initially working at Exel Logistics, where he was one of the founding directors, then some years at Danzas, before working for Accenture and then IBM as a Industry specialist.

One the fundamental capabilities in Bisham, explains Mark, are the teams focus and experience on operations, and “solutions that work”. He has identified that:- 

• The small dedicated team has over 300 year’s operational experience including, we believe, working in over 1000 warehouses!
• Whilst the team has deep analytical skills and access to and a high level of proficiency of using the appropriate modelling and simulation tools, it is their, intuition, insight, and practical experience that sets them apart.
• Bisham has a specific methodology, which supports the search for consistency of operational excellence. We have carried out for a number of clients a “Rapid Diagnostic Review”, a highly intensive root cause analysis. We are talking 4/10 people, depending on the scale of complexity of the operations for 3 /4 days to review an operation, and identify quickly and to the point, the issues, impacts, and likely resolution to performance problems. This process involves direct engagement with the site operational people, and continuous feedback to drive quickly to consensus.
• At the moment, the Bisham Consulting team is handling projects involving a logistics spend of 500 million Euros and a combined retail turnover in excess of 10 billion Euros in the UK and France.  We are currently reviewing operations totalling 500,000 square metres of conventional and automated warehousing and the fleet operations of 4,000 vehicles serving 3,000 retail stores and 10,000 home deliveries a week.

We believe in Bisham that we could help companies accelerate the pace of the drive to consistent operational excellence, with a combination of Rapid Diagnosis Reviews at target operations, the transferring of reusable skills and knowledge to enable companies’ teams to continue, and the ability to support specific implementation of operational change, by providing flexible, agile and highly professional resources.