In Spain, ‘British punctuality’ is often cited as the gold standard for arriving on time at a destination, but the truth is that the British are not particularly special in this regard. If anything, it is we Spaniards who are the exception, as the concept of punctuality we have on the peninsula is rather unique.
In the road transport sector, punctuality is understood simply as a delivery arriving on the scheduled day – and that’s it. A delivery is scheduled for a specific day without further detail, but in our transport of liquid foodstuffs with deliveries across Europe, the concept changes radically.
At Rios Sangiao, we have been working for years with European clients on international transport routes, and in this market it is essential to understand from the outset that punctuality involves what we in Spain would call ‘exactness’. It is not enough for the goods to be delivered on the scheduled day; they must also be delivered at the scheduled time.
In most of the countries where we carry out transports of juices, milk and food liquids for human consumption in general, punctuality is expected to include a specific delivery time slot. Countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and even Italy do not accept ‘open-ended’ deliveries. In the deliveries we carry out, we form part of a large production chain that requires maximum coordination between its links to avoid production stoppages, which entail enormous subsequent start-up costs and a loss of efficiency and profitability.
Thus, it is common that when we deliver glucose to Germany, olive oil to northern France or juices to Italy, we have a specific time slot – which does not usually exceed one hour – for unloading or loading the goods. In this way, the product leaves the factory and is distributed without incurring storage costs for the producer. Alternatively, the product arrives at the factory and is processed without losing its properties due to storage time, during which oxidation or any other form of degradation might occur. Planning is key to efficiency.
Delivery accuracy is even more critical in certain, even more complex environments such as Rotterdam, where we cover several routes. This city, with a port stretching over forty kilometres, is home to Europe’s most important land-sea logistics hub, and the volume of traffic and goods passing through this point is absolutely staggering: nearly 430 million tonnes handled annually and more than 100,000 vessels.
For all this activity to function smoothly, punctuality here demands that arrivals are calculated in minute-long windows, and departures and arrivals are fully monitored to ensure that everything is synchronised and runs like clockwork.
Although it is within the port area itself that the strictest controls are in place and delivery and collection windows are most tightly restricted, companies located on the outskirts of the port area are subject to very similar controls because, after all, they operate within the port and must therefore adapt to its rhythms,
so it does not matter if the Spanish wine – to give an example – that we might transport to Rotterdam does not go directly to the port, because the company where we unload it operates in a similar way to the entire logistics network in the area.
Working in this way demands professionalism and constant reviews of the transport department’s planning to fine-tune routes, timetables and efficiency as much as possible, coordinating our fleet with a level of detail that is unusual in domestic deliveries.
When we talk about on-time deliveries, at Rios Sangiao we’re really talking about precision.
This has been the work of Sr. Concejo
