Fleet consulting might not be for everyone. Providing advisory services (think fleet management organisation, best loading practices etc.) means you need to know them in the first place – as well as having the available resources on hand to make it happen.
If you do get it right, and a number of opportunities are opened up to your business:
- Expand the scope of any customer engagement (sell more)
- Develop longer-term customer relationships (sell more often)
- Position yourself as a leading authority on transport refrigeration (sell what you know as well as what you do)
To show these factors in action, let’s take a brief look at one particular Thermo King dealer – based in the Netherlands – and one particular customer story.
Fleet consulting in pharmaceuticals
TK Transportkoeling know a thing or two about the world of pharmaceutical distribution. Insights they’ve put to good use in building out their fleet consulting credentials. They’re also comfortable getting into the detail, which is exactly what they did when one client requested advice on:
- Good Distribution Practice (GDP) for medicinal products
- Best practice policies for last mile distribution
- Creating and analyzing a number of performance calculations
Managing medicine
GDP itself offers a great way to demonstrate specialist knowledge. These EU guidelines (first published in 1994, with a revision in 2013 in case you’re interested!) detail the necessary practices involved in the storage and distribution of medicinal products.
With them come the ‘appropriate tools’ for assisting wholesale distributors, and for preventing falsified medicines from entering the legal supply chain. In other words, they set the baseline for good distribution practices when it comes to moving medicines designed for human use.
As a part of their solution, TK Transportkoeling worked closely together with the customer’s distribution managers to provide a detailed analysis of GDP guidelines – and what it meant to them.
End-to-end advice
Then there’s ‘last mile distribution’. Ensuring the integrity of the pharma cold chain is obviously as important (and challenging) as ever – across warehouses, distribution centres, and transport fleets.
After exploring the different types of medicine and delivery schedules, TK Transportkoeling was able to provide advice on developing and selecting the best choice of vehicle/refrigeration solution on order to:
- Ensure goods transported comply with GDP regulation
- Enable standardization of the vehicle fleet
- Improve risk management during transport
To back up their assessment, TK Transportkoeling were even able to ‘road test’ their calculations – in a certified IR testing facility.
Delivering real-world benefits
As for the benefits this approach delivered:
For the customer: their understanding of GDP compliance was greatly improved, giving them confidence that best practices were being followed throughout – including the ‘last mile’.
For TK Transportkoeling: such a fleet consulting approach meant they ended up selling 45 additional units – and on top of that they also agreed an exclusivity contract.
