For the past 12 years RH Freight, the UK’s leading European freight operator has been helping the European agricultural industry run as smoothly as possible.
RH works with John Deere Ltd in the UK and is responsible for delivering replenishment shipments of many spare parts to both their Irish dealer network from both the UK HQ and the European Parts Hub Distribution Centre in Germany. At the height (from April to October) this could mean up 100 shipments a day.
Founded in 1837, John Deere has grown from a one-man blacksmith shop into a worldwide corporation that today does business in more than 160 countries and employs around 46,000 people worldwide.
Interestingly, RH can also traces its origins back to the 19th century, to 1849 in fact when John Rennie, a Scottish entrepreneur, won a ship in a bet and founded a shipping company which, over the following century, grew into a multi-national operation. In the late 1960s, Rennie’s merged its freight forwarding business with Hogg Robinson and in 1970, decided to sell off its British freight operations, the Midlands branches were subject to a management buy out by Neville Baxter and so RH was born.
John Deere’s business today is defined by five areas: Agricultural Equipment; Commercial and Consumer Equipment, Homeowner Equipment, Golf and Turf, Forestry Equipment and Power Systems. The company also offers a complete line of John Deere parts and accessories. Established in the UK in 1966, the John Deere HQ is responsible for parts and service support, as well as its training centre and workshop facilities.
RH assists in shipping John Deere’s “ugly” parts freight, a vast range of Agricultural Equipment from the company’s dedicated parts department in the UK (holding 45,000 lines) such as tractor cabs to wheels and engines.
RH has over 4,000 customer accounts across many industry sectors and transports a variety of non-food products, ranging from engineering components to electronics to textiles and healthcare goods. RH handles over 350,000 European shipments per year.
Christine Kingdom, Import & Export Co-ordinator for John Deere Ltd, chose to join forces with a local freight specialist to deliver JD replenishment freight. RH’s Nottingham HUB is just over 10 miles away from John Deere’s Langar HQ and RH operates over 300 trucks and 650 semi-trailers, which run daily to destinations right across Europe. Over the past few years RH has invested £3.75million in upgrading the Nottingham hub, with the addition of 8000m2 of warehousing and docking bays.
“Breakdowns and replacement parts can be key to the effective running of a successful agricultural business”, commented Christine. “With the agricultural industry being so reliant on seasonality and weather patterns, getting replacements of new parts quickly does make all the difference between being able to replenish dealer stock. This boosts customer confidence and reduces machine down time to a minimum.
“It’s therefore essential that we support our dealer network using the best transport companies available by delivering seven days a week.
Deliveries to John Deere customers across continental Europe to Germany, Italy and France as well as the UK can be sent on a special red alert special service that John Deere have with RH – where small items less than 1.5metres and less than 60kg going on either a one, two or three days service to dealers depending on the urgency.
John Deere is able to track deliveries through RH’s monitoring system whereby the location of all trucks is monitored through satellite tracking. This satellite functionality was developed by RH’s in-house IT team (in partnership with clients) and is part of a £2m new state of the art system which brings together all RH’s operational systems including vehicle messaging, consignment tracking, warehousing, sales and invoicing systems. This is supported by RH’s dedicated Freight Account Managers (FAMs) who act as the single point of contact for customers.
Peter Isler, Commercial Director at RH added; “The way our Freight Account Managers work is different to most in the industry, this dedicated team works closely with customers, taking bookings, progress chasing (where necessary) and keeping the customer informed about the progress of their consignment. Over the past decade we’ve worked closely with John Deere to develop more customer focused services that in turn enables them to deliver quickly and efficiently to their dealers. The agricultural business is all about being responsive which something RH is dedicated to across the company.”