Member Article

GFS growth plans spur expansion at home and abroad

The UK’s leading parcel and carrier manager has announced a series of major initiatives which it says provide the foundation for significant future growth.

As well as moving to a new and bigger head office, Global Freight Solutions (GFS) has opened a northern consolidation depot in Warrington in order to provide even more diverse operational solutions and increased levels of customer service.

The domestic expansion has been complemented by the firm’s decision to open its first overseas office in Greece to accelerate the development of its innovative range of logistics software.

Managing Director Neil Cotty said each of the steps taken were key parts of a strategy designed to capitalise on the considerable momentum which GFS has built up since being founded almost fourteen years ago.

He added that they added up to “a recipe for continued progression, innovation and growth”.

“We have invested a great deal of time and effort to determine how best to keep GFS moving forward and supporting the broad range of carrier management solutions that we provide clients with.

“These announcements amount to the first few initiatives and reflect both the growth which we have already seen and some of the elements which we firmly believe will enable further improvements in services, standards and volumes.

“We remain absolutely determined to give our clients the very best levels of support, wherever they may be - in order to help them grow their own sales and develop their own businesses.”

The changes include a switch of location for the GFS head office, from Billingshurst to Horsham, a move which allows for the creation of a customer training centre, a unit aimed at helping clients gain the maximum benefit from the suite of carrier management software developed by the company.

Equally significant is the setting up of a consolidation depot at Warrington, something which Mr Cotty described as “a major step forward” for the business.

Rather than dealing with many different carriers every day, clients across a broad swathe of northern and central England, including Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire and Staffordshire will have the option of a single collection operated by GFS, which will then consolidate and inject the items into the relevant delivery partners.

Twenty-five people will initially be employed in the GFS premises on Warrington’s Taurus Business Park, of whom half will be new appointments. The facility complements the company’s existing hub operation that has been operating at Coventry Airport since 2011.

The Warrington site, explained Mr Cotty, was a demonstration of how a complex dispatch profile could be managed simply, without causing complications for shippers using GFS systems and expertise.

The firm’s new Athens office, meanwhile, will supplement existing UK and Russian based developers and support work with a growing roster of clients at home and abroad. Ten staff have been recruited there initially with Mr Cotty suggesting that GFS will look to make further hires as the operation takes off.

He said: “We have had a developer in Athens for over two years and felt that the time was right to take advantage of the further pool of development talent available in Greece to support our growth plans. We regard this expansion as reinforcing our commitment to maintaining the excellence which has made us a leader in our field.

“In Athens, we believe we have found the ideal team to complement our UK operation, capable of reinforcing the merits of our products to clients in a wide range of industries as well as representing a platform for work with more clients across the Continent.

“We believe that this will be something of a model for offices in other territories which, in turn, will be part of just one phase of a wider corporate development. The GFS office in Greece is not unprecedented for GFS as the company has operated a team of developers in Russia since 2003.”

GFS was founded in 2001 and supplies bespoke carriage and software solutions via its unique Enterprise Carrier Management platform to clients in the UK and abroad.

Last year, it moved in excess of 10 million parcels on behalf of a number of leading national and international B2B and B2C operations.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Malia .